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Indigenous voices on research methodology

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Reading/listening suggestions for people doing language documentation and description and who are interested in perspectives from indigenous people:  "Something's gotta change" book by Lesley Woods (2023): https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/asia-pacific-linguistics/somethings-gotta-change   (Indigenous Australia generally) also Gaby, A., & Woods, L. (2020). Toward linguistic justice for Indigenous people: A response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz.  Language ,  96 (4), e268-e280  https://old.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/e05_96.4Gaby.pdf   also podcast Because Language episode 35 which features interview with Woods & Gaby https://becauselanguage.com/35-somethings-got-to-change/ "Decolonizing Methodologies" by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonizing_Methodologies (Māori, New Zealand) Zobule, A. G., & McDougall, D. Grammar as a bridge: Empowering Indigenous learners in a Solomo...
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Language population data from Google (FREE!)

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Google's linguistics research team have put together a great big table of speaker population size data and other information. There is population data for over 5,000 languages. It's free, it includes sources and you can get it here: https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp/tree/main/linguameta .  Proper citation is: @InProceedings{ritchie-etal-2024-linguameta-unified, author = {Ritchie, Sandy and van Esch, Daan and Okonkwo, Uche and Vashishth, Shikhar and Drummond, Emily}, title = {LinguaMeta: Unified metadata for thousands of languages}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation}, month = {May}, year = {2024}, address = {Torino, Italy}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association}, pages = {10530–-10538}, abstract = {We introduce LinguaMeta, a unified resource for language metadata for thousands of languages, includi...
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CLDF for dummies (v1.0)

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  I wrote a little document called "CLDF for dummies" based on what I know about CLDF that I think may be helpful to other researchers in language and cultural diversity and evolution. I am NOT a CLDF-developer or editor, this is all from an end-user perspective. I'll keep a full and updated version here . Here is version 1.0: CLDF for dummies This document outlines some of the very basics of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) for researchers who want to use the data sets for analysis, comparison or plotting. CLDF is a way of organizing language data, in particular data sets with many different languages in it. The basic organisation is a set of tables, usually in csv-sheets (languages.csv, forms.csv etc). These documents are linked to each other in a specific way which makes it possible to combine them into an interlinked database. The files are all governed by standards, there are sanity-checks to make sure all lines up right. Because they are often just plain csv...
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A racist map of the world's languages

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Detail of world map of languages and races from 1924. The legend outlines language groups of the "yellow race". In order to move forward towards racial and social justice as a discipline we must become familiar with our history and the ways in which racist, colonialist, sexist and classist ideas are still present in our academic spaces. I would like to present to you a concrete piece of evidence of our racist past in particular - a world-map where languages are grouped into three races: white, yellow and black.  I started writing this blog post several years ago, but ended up not posting it because I felt there was so much to say and I wasn't sure I was the right person to say it, nor able to cover all related content in a fair and accessible manner. With the recent publication of the article Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession by Charity Hudley, Mallinson & Bucholtz ...
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