ABSTRACT
Nicholas Evans, a linguist who has worked extensively with speakers of endangered languages in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, describes the urgency and importance of the task of field linguists. Across the globe there are many people wanting to learn and engage with their heritage languages in meaningful ways. In spite of loss, the diversity of the world's languages is truly breath-taking. Capturing the breadth and complexity of the world's languages often means undertaking field research in remote regions and adopting the highest standards in data collection and curation. Although field research takes place in urban settings, to ensure that students undertaking research on endangered languages in remote areas or in countries which have undergone European expansion are well prepared for the challenges of fieldwork in these complex settings. Linguistic data is crucial for the development of audio-visual language corpora which form the basis of many outputs standard to documentation projects, such as grammars, dictionaries and text collections.
