Adequacy in documentation

As more and more languages are becoming endangered, our notions of what it means to adequately document a language are changing. Further, while some languages remain undocumented, dictionaries, grammars, and texts are available for more and more languages, enabling researchers to broaden the scope of their documentation efforts. This article examines the question of adequacy in language documentation from a number of perspectives and proposes some general guiding principles for documentation efforts. Points of discussion include the interplay between documentation and description; the potential for diversity in all aspects of documentation, such as diversity of linguistic data, consultants, fieldworkers, and products; and the interaction of the different participants in documentation efforts.