Learning a language
What to Do When a Language Has No Course or App
Grammars, wordlists, field recordings, community contacts and the order to try them in.
When a language has no course, app, or even a straightforward way in for learners, the crucial first steps are to gather a basic wordlist, a few simple sentences, and recordings of those elements from one or more speakers.
Start with the shortest usable core
To learn a rare or endangered language with minimal documentation, rely on the shortest possible initial corpus of vocabulary and constructions. Get those items from a single speaker, record the pronunciations, and transcribe the sounds into a phonemic writing system. Even this tiny core "will form the basis of your future work" in learning the language, the guide explains. For many untaught and under-resourced languages, this is the point at which learners must start learning independently, long before there is an app on the market.
Use recordings as the next layer
Build out from that basic starting point by making audio and video recordings of the language. Archive collections often contain useful multimedia materials for less-documented languages. The Archive collections often hold recordings of everyday conversations and annotations of cultural practices, such as boat-building. Look for institutions' own audio and video materials. For example, an archive of 170 languages maintained by Some archives partially cover the languages spoken by small indigenous groups. Browsing an archive's content can quickly expand a learner's sense of a language's typical sounds, rhythms, and social settings.
Pull in more than one speaker
When you collect recordings of the language, identify more than one speaker to record — and transcribe and analyze the speech of all of them. As a rule, language-learning strategies educated by real field research recommend pulling in speakers whose identities and backgrounds differ. Getting a viewpoint on the language from several speakers "will lead to more balanced and accurate results," a fieldwork guide says. A fieldwork guide, a worldwide network of linguists, recommends "working with more than one speaker early on" and getting a beginner's list of words from several people talking.
Treat community links as part of the method
Building up a usable body of a language requires reaching out to people through community networks. Consult the Some organizations finding guides, which offer in-depth help with searching their collections of 7,000+ languages. If there is a local branch, call a staff member to chat about where they have found active projects in the language, who the main contacts are, and what peer groups explore the language. For more expert materials, the Some archives has an evolving collection of repeatable teaching materials and tutorials. Contact the contributing experts and consultants to ask their advice and to see if they can send or signpost you to newer data your first searches haven't turned up.
Build from documentation, not from an app
Learning a language through carefully selected documentary sources is a more systematic way that makes most sense in the earliest stages of encounter. The reality is that archival collections and institutional archives are the real curriculums for rare, endangered, or barely documented languages. Some organizations put the materials continuously out on the web for "language workers", according to a project statement. Ask the archivist about recorded interviews, anthropological studies, and annotated text corpora they can forward. Specialists write in blogs and papers about the intralinear details archival documentation can teach you. Look up what linguists share about fieldwork online. Tap into their working networks.
What the workflow actually looks like
Background with the basics of fieldwork methodology is worthwhile even when beginning solo. A field linguist says, "start with a short elicitation session, recording common vocabulary and short passages on familiar themesчные." Develop a standard set of prompts. For a language with extremely limited prior study, you will often set aside time for: 1. eliciting basic vocabulary and tested language constructions from any speakers you can meet, 2. recording and transcribing the speakers' pronunciations, 3. documenting notable differences among speakers on matters of grammar, word formation, vocabulary, and style, 4. setting aside each item and recording with metadata for future reference, and 5. returning, noting gaps, salient ambiguities, and fruit-bearing directions for the next session.
This may be anywhere from half a day to a week, depending on how much a learner can access organized community efforts to the materials set aside.
Where this sits in the Register
Written by the Linguasphere desk. Classification data referred to here comes from the Linguasphere Register — see sources and attribution.