Tag Archives: literacy

Choosing a suitable site for fieldwork, and working with illiterate informants in China

I spent a formative part of my first career doing dialect fieldwork in an effort to document conservative forms of Chinese that would soon disappear. In the Spring of 2010, I was asked how to pick a location that would be useful and find a really good illiterate informant. (For many Western fieldworkers studying unwritten languages, illiterate speakers are preferred.) Below was my response.

As for “useful”, it depends on what you want to use it for. I went to the places I did in order to answer a specific set of questions about issues in classification. But my view is that any location is fine, provided you have superb informants there and know how to make full use of them. The informant is always the limiting factor. If I felt myself free to continue doing fieldwork, I would work with any appropriate person I could find, regardless of what they spoke. If you have a good informant, you can get good data, and with good data you can always find interesting things. So never mind the place — any will do.

I have not had the best luck with illiterate people in China. Basically, I think that literacy is such a central part of Chinese culture that anyone who has linguistic skills will learn how to read. It’s quite a different matter with some of the minority languages.

There are definite character traits associated with being a good informant, and having a “verbal personality” is one of them. The ability to explain the same word consistently on different days, to enunciate tones clearly and be able to say whether two syllables have the same tones or not, to explain the functioning of grammar words and idioms — things like these are what we are interested in, and knowing Mandarin and how to read does not lessen the informant’s ability to do them. But in my experience, someone Chinese who has these skills and has nonetheless not learned how to read — well, such people are few.

The personality and ability of the informant are the key to everything. I wouldn’t insist on illiteracy.

My mother and me, at work on the Early China index, 20110526

This summer my mother and I finished indexing a book that Li Feng and I have been working on since 2005, Reading and Literacy in Early China. My mother worked on it continuously for six months; I helped her on and off but then worked on it continuously for the final six weeks.

Below is a picture of us in the heat of labor in late May.

I’ve also attached a pair of the 5000 index cards she produced for this project. These things are now rarely seen, I think, so they’re good to document here. Not so very long ago, the only way to find books in a library was though a “card catalogue” — a huge collection of these things, typed in recent decades and neatly handwritten before that, organized and cross-referenced by title, author, major topics, and other features. Cataloguing books — deciding how someone might want want to find them and creating cards accordingly — was a major subprofession among librarians, and my mother has a degree in it from Columbia’s defunct Library School.

As you can imagine, the contents of this pair of cards have been copied and recopied over and over again as the material has grown fuller and more complete. The “xx” notations at the bottom of each card are for tracking cross-references to “literacy” that appear in other entries.I used \LaTeX and other tools to produce camera-ready copy for the publisher. With heavy editing, the index shrank from an initial 100 pages to the final 44 that are appearing in the book. Alas, much useful information had to be deleted in the process.

Deborah Ball’s article on the opposition to standardizing the Romansh language (WSJ)

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Romansh, one of the minor Romance languages, with a meager population of some 60,000 speakers (Wall Street Journal, 1 September, 2011, p. A10). It is native to Val Müstair (Münstertal) at the far eastern edge of the Swiss Alps.

As has happened in so many other places, a political effort to protect the language has led to the creation of an official standard that no one speaks natively and that is now in conflict with the living dialects. Children are confronted with the constructed official standard (Romansh Grischun or RG) in school and a different native dialect at home.

Much of the article deals with a movement to oppose RG. The article ends with a linguist quoting some speakers as saying “If they’re going to take away my mother tongue, I’d just as soon speak German.”

W. D. Elcock’s Romance Languages (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1960), 478–81, says:

As a language [Romansh] profited from the general increase in literacy and tended to become the object of a patriotic cult, symbolic of local autonomy. This tendency came to a head in 1938, when the inhabitants, alarmed by the extravagant territorial claims of Fascist Italy, backed by the gratuitous assertion that [Romansh] is an Italian dialect, successfully brought pressure on the Federal Government to secure its recognition as the fourth national language of Switzerland.

Elcock goes on to describe two competing standards, one each for two towns with majority Catholic or Protestant populations, respectively. Elcock adds that the Protestant standard is (was?) more conservative, as it has been connected with printed religious literature since the sixteenth century.

Val Müstair’s dialect is made to sound very parochial and isolated in Elcock’s book.

In 1970, Rebecca Posner says,

Nowadays one has the impression that the Romance-speaking peasants are being swamped by Germanic hotel proprietors.

(Rebecca Posner, The Romance Languages: A linguistic introduction, [Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970], pp. 259–61)