Practices and Challenges in Documenting Endangered Jewish Languages: A Researchers’ Forum

Abstract

This forum brings together nine researchers to offer their perspectives on the process of language documentation. Questions include how they find speakers, how they conduct their research, and what linguistic data and metadata they collect. We asked about practical and scholarly issues that have arisen in their fieldwork, including speakers avoiding stigmatized linguistic features and exhibiting influences from Modern Hebrew. Some of the points apply specifically to Jewish languages, and others are generalizable to endangered language documentation or even linguistic research more broadly.