Benjamin Macaulay and Jinhee Kwon, Lund University

Theoretical and methodological progress in linguistics has been greatest for situations with ideal conditions for research. Speech communities that are geographically or culturally more proximate to researchers, and which have large available participant pools, are easier to study and thus have a privileged position in linguistic research. But how do we ensure that speech communities that are less accessible to researchers, specifically those of endangered and Indigenous languages, don’t get left behind?

This talk will highlight some of the obstacles in applying advances in theory and method to a fieldwork linguistic context, focusing on the case of Saaroa, an Austronesian language of Taiwan. Saaroa has fewer than ten known speakers, including students in an ongoing revitalization program. In the course of a project documenting intonation in the languages of Taiwan, it was found that tribal, administrative, and linguistic definitions of speakerhood do not necessarily converge. Additionally, despite the high importance of Saaroa data in Austronesian studies (as a first-order branch of the family), the low population size affects the availability of certain quantitative methods. We argue that it is possible to overcome these issues, and that progress in doing so will benefit the field as a whole. The talk concludes with results from an ongoing study of pitch accent alignment including data from Saaroa.