Language endangerment and community empowerment: Experience form community training in the Moken language documentation and preservation project

Abstract

     Language endangerment and extinction is currently a critical issue among linguists around the world. It is known that language attrition and loss dramatically progress, work on documentation and preservation should be done prior to the last speaker of such language passing away. It is found that there are at least fifteen languages in Thailand which suffer from language decline and will be extinct very soon. Moken language (ISO 693-3 code mwt) is one of language which is regarded as the dying languages. Like other endangered languages, Moken language and local heritage knowledge gradually decline without any transmission to younger generations. Thus, the Moken language documentation and preservation project (MLDPP) was initiated with an attempt to document and preserve Moken language and its oral literature before its extinction. As a part of MLDPP, this paper describes about how the community-training program is maneuvered. This contributes to collaborative language documentation and preservation project. As participatory action research, a grounded-theoretical approach together with on-the-job-training was adopted for contributing to the most benefit of community members. Based on almost-threemonth training, the native researchers were able to initiate documenting their local knowledge and to manage the fieldwork without the researcher. They were able to document over 100 video records of Moken place names in Surin Islands with 27 min long and over 50 video records of traditional ecological knowledge with 20 min long without the linguist's supervision.