As noted in a previous post, the journal Language Documentation and Description (LDD) Volume 24 includes a number of Language Snapshots articles which provide basic information about languages and their speakers. To finish up 2024, two more Snapshots have appeared:
- Chagossian Creole (Indian Ocean and Western Europe) — this is a French-lexified Indian Ocean creole spoken previously by the indigenous population of the Chagos Archipelago. Between 1965-1973, the British government forcibly displaced the entire population to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Many Chagossians have since migrated to, or have grown up in, the UK. The Chagossian case is exceptional in that most of the population speaks Creole as a heritage language, far removed from their native shores, and dislocated from a traditional sociocultural base. This paper serves as the basis to build a community-based research agenda for Chagossian Creole;
- Uruangnirin (Indonesia) — this is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia spoken by around 400 people on the two easternmost Karas Islands. The language is part of the Tanimbar-Bomberai subgroup, which includes 13 languages on and around Bomberai Peninsula and Tanimbar Island. The language is endangered, as people born after around 2000 are not acquiring it. Documentation and description of Uruangnirin is in progress, and a 30-hour corpus of audiovisual material can be accessed online.
Note that in July 2024 LDD decided to discontinue the Language Snapshots series in its present form. The journal will no longer be accepting individual Language Snapshot submissions. However, it will continue to consider proposals for collections of snapshots on sets of languages that are related in some interesting way (genealogically, areally, typologically, etc.). Several such collections have already appeared (see here and here) and others are currently being processed and will be published in 2025. Those interested in making a submission should contact the LDD editor to discuss possibilities.
Note that the longer and more detailed Language Contexts series is not affected by this decision. These articles describe the contemporary contexts in which languages or varieties are spoken, rather than focussing on their structure. They aim to provide detailed up-to-date social, cultural, and ethnographic information to complement existing reference sources such as Glottolog, Ethnologue or ELCat. Articles cover topics such as speaker demography, social organisation, culture, linguistic ecology, language vitality, language use and transmission in the community and its diaspora, the range of languages/varieties in use by speakers, and socio-cultural factors affecting language/variety choice. For examples see here.