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In:The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations
Edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig
[Studies in Language Companion Series 240] 2026
► pp. 263–286

Chapter 11
Reflections on literacy in language documentation

 | University of Cologne
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This chapter is concerned with improving our understanding of literacies through language documentation. It addresses different types of writing practices and the use of documentation corpora in this regard. While writing is often taken for granted for languages with a tradition in this modality, it can be seen as “intrusive and alien” (Finnegan 2008: 22) in other contexts. Yet Himmelmann (cf. 2018: 36) points out that hardly any language community nowadays has not encountered a written standard. Accordingly, this chapter argues to increase the efforts in documenting the rich perspectives on and practices of literacy in linguistic communities worldwide. The rationale is that this may enhance knowledge about literate structures in the languages documented as well as in linguistic theory.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Orality, literacy, and different ways of knowing
  • 3.The rationale of a comprehensive documentation of writing practices
  • 4.Different types of writing practices, examples and implications for their documentation
    • 4.1Documenting existing writing practices
    • 4.2Documenting writing practices that emerge through documentation
    • 4.3Prospects of documenting writing practices that exist prior to or emerge through documentation
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (84)
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