Brittany Hoback
LALS PhD Candidate

Doing fieldwork is often mentioned as a part of methods courses, however, the realities of fieldwork and the challenges faced by linguists returning from the field are often saved for adventure swapping over drinks with colleagues and excluded from academic discourse. It is rare that linguists or ethnographers share the fretful, tenuous, aggravating, inspiring and awing realities of fieldwork. In this talk, I present on my work with the community of Denggan language speakers in rural Malekula Island, Vanuatu. The aims of this fieldwork were to establish a community language project, to determine an orthography for the previously unwritten language, and continue to document the language through video and audio recordings and a formal grammar sketch. I discuss the establishment of this language project and the preliminary results of our orthography workshops (the good). I also reveal challenges I faced (the sometimes ugly) and the innovative solutions I discovered through this experience. Lastly, this presentation touches on the beauty of working on a community orthography and documentation project and highlights the future of this language project in the hands of the next generation (the beautiful).