1. Field of study

The field of study is restricted here to non-national or minority languages. National languages and their sub-varieties are excluded because the special problems their study involves will be treated in another chapter on dialect recordings. Pidgin and creole varieties are, however, included in this section.

In Australia, for example, Standard Australian English and its sub-varieties would not be covered by the concerns of this chapter but the over two hundred Australian (Aboriginal) languages and their English based pidgin/creole varieties would be included. Clearly for some other countries the situation is more complex. For instance, there might be a number of national languages or it may be difficult to decide whether some national language, in Africa for example, should be excluded. Admittedly restricting the field of study in this way is arbitrary and inevitably there will be overlaps. In addition to dialect other fields of study dealt with in this volume which overlap include ethnomusicology, folklore and oral history.

Often the languages treated here will have no writing system or otherwise a writing system that has only recently been introduced. There will be little or no literature for such languages so that sound recordings may form their most substantial permanent record and be of tremendous value to users of the archive and to the speakers themselves.