Conclusion: WELD

• The initial result of fieldwork is Language Documentation.

• The WELD paradigm (Workable Endangered Language Documentation) includes a charter of principles for a modern and inclusive language documentation paradigm: "Language documentation must be ..."

  • Comprehensive: all languages, data annotated with sounds, meanings and functions
  • Efficient: locally usable enabling hardware (Simputer) and software (annotation, lexicography and corpus management tools)
  • State-of-the-art: not only using modern documentary technologies (XML), but also systematisation aids (multimodal concordancing) and machine learning (lexicon and grammar induction from corpora)
  • Affordable: Local communities cannot afford Internet connections
  • Fair: Where data are given freely - tools must be given freely, or else the "coffee exploitation scenario" holds