Philology in the folklore archive: Interpreting past documentation of the Kraasna dialect of Estonian
- Tobias Weber
Abstract
In this paper I share my experience of studying past documentation of the extinct Kraasna variety of South Estonian without access to native speakers, their descendants,or the researchers who conducted fieldwork in the community. After an overview of the historical and sociolinguistic contexts for early 20th-century Kraasna documentation projects, I illustrate the work I had to do to reconstruct information about Kraasna legacy materials in order to use them in my own research. The main obstacle lay in incomplete information about the original researchers and consultants, the circumstances of their fieldwork, and the methods utilised to produce the documentary artefacts that are available to work with today. The process of reconstructing this information led me to realise that the philological work of restoring the meta-documentation behind a project has as much academic value as the initial recording of material or the subsequent linguistic description. At the same time, the work of editing and curating legacy materials folds secondary researchers into the picture that they reconstruct about previous documentation. Thus, users of legacy materials need to adopt a reflexive stance on their own role in the research process, one that is best served by a philological approach that recognises the human involvement in every step of the creation, reception, and replication of documentary linguistic materials.
Keywords: folklore, south estonian, legacy, philology, linguistic
How to Cite:
Weber, T., (2021) “Philology in the folklore archive: Interpreting past documentation of the Kraasna dialect of Estonian”, Language Documentation and Description 21, 70-100. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd18
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