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3Inferring Prescriptivism: Considerations Inspired by Hobongan and Minority Language Documentation
Marla Perkins
1 Introduction
Beginning with introductory linguistics courses and continuing throughout graduate education and into professional publication, prescriptivism is presented to linguists as an inadequate way of analyzing linguistic material, and descriptivism is presented as a vastly preferable alternative. This type of bifurcated thinking might be useful as a way to introduce people to the idealized goals of linguistic analysis, but in actual linguistic practice, pragmatically inferable prescriptivism can affect the ways in which linguistic analyses are created, interpreted and used. In this chapter, the prescriptive/descriptive concepts and their complications are examined in light of my ongoing linguistic description of Hobongan.
Studying prescriptivism was not part of the project when I began documenting Hobongan; the goal was to produce a linguistic description of the language, from a descriptive standpoint. But I have encountered many complexities while documenting this language, and they have necessitated a re-evaluation of the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide. These encounters provide the foundation of this chapter. My focus on Hobongan, then, does not stem from any particular aspect about that language with regard to prescriptivism, although in retrospect, the graded social status of the various dialects and the language planning policies of Indonesia, both topics addressed below, have undoubtedly been a catalyst for many of my thoughts. Presumably any language being documented for the first time and with enough social variation among its speakers would prompt similar questions. The decisions required for managing variation in language documentation as well as the consequences of those decisions are the key features that would be shared in several language documentation endeavors, and responding to those challenges opens up questions about prescriptive practice in general.
1.1 Introduction to the language and community: Hobongan
Hobongan is an Austronesian language, according to its categorization as provided by a survey of the languages of Borneo (Hammarström et al., 2017; Lewis et al., 2016; Sellato & Sercombe, 2007). Syntactically, it is primarily Subject Verb Object (SVO), and morphologically it is primarily analytic. For this chapter, the social context of the language is crucial. The language is spoken by approximately 2000 people across three generations and is the dominant language in the geographic area in which it is spoken. This dominance is evidenced by the fact that people wish to marry into the Hobongan group, partially because there is gold along the parts of the Kapuas River that lie within traditional Hobongan territory. There are five main Hobongan villages mostly along the Kapuas Hobongan Rivers, with some smaller groups living farther from the main rivers. In part because of their frequent travel along the river and their community involvement in major events, the Hobongan interact across village groups frequently, which minimizes dialectal variation across groups but does not minimize such variation across generations.
The Hobongan mostly maintain a traditional lifestyle, with a few exceptions. They now travel regularly to a town, Putussibau, where they can exchange gold for cash and buy supplies that they do not readily produce themselves. Education has changed enormously: the Indonesian government provides a schoolteacher for the elementary school children in the community, and all elementary education takes places in Bahasa Indonesian (BI), the official language of the Indonesian government, except for one course in Christian religion that was developed by a missionary who works with the Hobongan. If families want children to continue their education beyond the elementary grades, the children must move into town and find people with whom to live while they attend school, most of which takes place in BI or in a local lingua franca. In part because of the shift in education, living within the Hobongan community after graduation is optional, and some Hobongan have chosen to live permanently in town, rather than to return to the Hobongan villages and lifestyle.
1.2 Terms and methods
For the purposes of this chapter, prescriptivism and descriptivism are defined as they are customarily defined within the field of linguistics (Drake, 1977: 1, for example), with prescriptivism involving a ‘concern for “correctness”’ and a desire to ‘enforce uniformity and conformity to some absolute standard,’ and descriptivism involving ‘analyzing language as it currently functions in actual use.’ Drake emphasizes the notions of conformity and stability in prescriptivism, and of change and diversity in descriptivism.
The type of fieldwork conducted in this project is community-based language research (CBLR). Czaykowska-Higgins (2009) described CBLR as language research conducted on a language or languages, for the language community, with the language community and by the language community. In other words, the linguists involved are active participants as opposed to external observers (Dimmendaal, 2001), and native speakers are involved in the process of data collection and analysis, both as sources of data and as experts on the language or languages that they speak.
2 Prescriptivism after Description
Due to the complexities of languages and of the situations in which language research is conducted, there are many possible ways in which prescriptivism can interact with the research process. Despite language description often meeting the core criteria of descriptivism, in that it is based on and promotes documentation of change and promotion of diversity over conformity, the realities of how on-the-ground linguistic analysis is used challenge those core criteria. Many parties have an interest in language descriptions, and each introduces inferences and preferences into the interpretations and uses of descriptions. Some of these uses are perhaps inevitable, but I hope that this analysis of how descriptions are often understood and used prescriptively can influence and improve the ways in which descriptions are created and used so as to benefit the people involved.
2.1 In the field
It might be hoped that when a linguist is in the field, working among members of a language community, prescriptive ideas can be minimized to the point of elimination. However, a variety of factors contribute to making prescriptive ideas and ideals an integral part of the fieldwork situation.
2.1.1 In the field: Data collection – what is collected?
One way in which descriptive practice is inferentially introduced into prescriptivism derives from traditions about what information is typically included in language descriptions. My survey of descriptions of over 50 languages from over 30 language families showed (see Perkins, 2017, for a publication of some of
