provide material that looks drastically different from native speakers’ language usage, and those descriptions are then presented to speakers as descriptions of their languages, speakers could decide that, if that is what their languages really look like, there is no reason to conserve them. Their languages could become unrecognizable even to the speakers, and what remains recognizable would be only a tiny portion of what the languages are to and for the speakers.
2.1.2 In the field: Working with language informants
Working with informants introduces many complexities. The fact that linguistic description is often based primarily and exclusively on data provided by native informants can be similar to prescriptivist practice and have similar effects, in that the informants perform the role of the expert much like the prescriber in the prescriptive tradition. Often, a description of a language rests on the information provided by a single native speaker or, at best, a few speakers. The information, therefore, is literally an ipse dixitism, which is one of the hallmarks of prescriptivist practice. In a way, the description of the language rests on the intuitions of a single speaker or a small group of speakers, just as the description of a ‘correct’ language in the prescriptive tradition rests on the opinions of prescribers, who separate themselves from those who are pragmatically presented as the hoi polloi of language users. The motivations, of course, are different. The informants are not necessarily proscribing any forms by offering their own intuitions, whereas the prescribers are. Yet, depending on the number of informants and their representativeness of all speakers, the effects of their information can be similar to the effects of language prescriptivism. What counts as a native speaker is a question that has been raised and answered in a variety of ways (see Bonfiglio, 2010: 8–20, for a review of some of the major possibilities, along with Kalogjera & Starčević, 2014). In practice, native speakers, those who grew up speaking within a language community, have a variety of levels of expertise and of willingness to share whatever expertise they have with a researcher. The native speakers who contribute to language descriptions are therefore a group of people who are often partially self-selected by their willingness to help and partially available simply because of geographical and personal background. They are, therefore, usually not a representative sample, statistically or otherwise, of the community of language speakers.
2.2 Using descriptions
Prescriptivism continues to be evident once a description is completed. Many parties have an interest in language descriptions, and each introduces preferences into the uses of descriptions. Some of these uses are perhaps inevitable, and awareness of the ways in which people’s preferences guide the uses of descriptions could perhaps allow linguists to create descriptions that are as descriptive as possible while still being useful.
2.2.1 For language preservation: Maintaining diversity, minority rights
One outcome of linguistic description and analysis, particularly of minority languages, is the documentation and preservation of those minority languages and cultures. In some cases, a basic description of a language is all that is left of a language and culture whose native speakers have all died. Language documentation itself is therefore a form of prescriptivism, with the prescriptive idea being that any language and culture is worthy of preservation and therefore ought to be preserved in whatever form can be managed, whether that is through basic documentation alone or with more thorough work.
Currently, the Hobongan language is fairly stable, being spoken by the three generations of people who are recognized as generations: children, people who have children, and people who have grandchildren. However, because there are few speakers, only about 2000, and because of economic, bureaucratic and educational pressures, the Hobongan might not be able to maintain their language without significant linguistic, educational and institutional support.
The Hobongan themselves have recognized that their language is changing in ways that make it less Hobongan and less spoken by their children,2 and they have, to some extent, recognized the major causes of those shifts. They know that when they go to Putussibau to trade, the interactions are conducted in BI and a local trade language known as Malayu (not to be confused with Bahasa Melayu as used in Malaysia). They know that the Indonesian government requires all documentation of marriages, baptisms and citizenship to be in BI, and that official documentation has certain benefits such as the ability to travel or receive healthcare. They know that educating their children in BI is having drastic effects on the language and culture. They have noted with dismay that grandparents cannot discuss night-time dreams with their grandchildren because the grandchildren do not have the same expertise in the Hobongan language (having been educated in BI) or culture (having spent large portions of their childhoods living in Putussibau in order to go to school). Despite understanding many of the factors that are impinging on the Hobongan language and culture, the Hobongan have yet to take steps that would help them to maintain their language and culture.3 Such steps could include developing grade school curricula in Hobongan so that their children can stay in the Hobongan villages for their education and maintain their everyday uses of the language, or recording their oral histories as part of what is needed to gain minority rights from the Indonesian government. Many Hobongan do participate eagerly as language informants, moving the description along towards completion, which will in turn be available to them if they decide to move forward in the process of gaining minority rights.
As a linguist, I prefer to think that the Hobongan should, prescriptively, work towards preserving their language and culture by the means that are available to them, but this is a decision that cannot and probably should not be made by others. Language preservation works best when the language speakers themselves wish to preserve the language, a principle that is available from descriptive studies of language preservation efforts (e.g. Crystal, 2000). Although the Hobongan recognize the pressures on their language and culture and are not pleased by some of the changes, particularly when those changes negatively affect familial intimacy, they have not made the decisions that I would prefer that they make. Instead, they have made decisions that benefit them in ways that are more important to them than maintaining their uniqueness as Hobongan. These kinds of differences between what a linguist might want for a language community and what community members themselves might want come from differing perspectives. Linguists typically focus primarily on languages. Members of the community focus on all aspects of their lives including, in the case of the Hobongan, economic factors and social status, both of which can be enhanced by giving up the language, or at least by making significant concessions to the majority language and culture. Until languages and the people who speak those languages are valued for their unique contributions, by linguists, by language speakers and by those with power and influence in the majority language and culture, language preservation efforts will have to compete with all other complications of minority status.
2.3 For education and creativity
If the Hobongan were to develop grade-school curricula, the question arises as to what form of the language would be used and taught in school. Language descriptions typically privilege one dialect or form of a language over another, usually in an effort to provide the expected single description of a complex situation and to make the writing of a description doable in a finite amount of space and time. Despite the complexities involved in the creation of language descriptions, description materials are often used for creating standard forms and therefore a single, simpler form of a language, which then, through the educational process, become the forms that people ‘ought’ to use and that are taught in schools (Kalogjera & Starčević, 2014). In Hobongan, /r/ and /d/ are both produced in a variety of environments, leading to two main possibilities: they are allophonic variants of a single phoneme or they are different phonemes. Native-speaker consultants differ in their opinions as to whether they are different phonemes or different allophones. The missionaries who worked on creating a writing system for Hobongan treated the variants as allophonic variations, despite some native-speaker insights to the contrary. They were probably correct to make a decision: one language cannot be written in multiple ways without negative outcomes for understandability. The writing system itself is then reinforcing, in some ways prescribing, a certain understanding of the phonology of the language.
