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Language documentation is increasingly seen as a collaborative process, engaging community members as active participants. Collaborative research produces better documentation that is valuable for both the academic community and the speakers. However, in many communities, speakers and language advocates lack the skills necessary to fully engage in collaborative projects. One way to overcome this barrier is to provide language documentation training to community members. Such training should teach participants how to ethically and comprehensively complete every stage of the documentation process while offering opportunity for theoretical discussion and practical application. In this paper, we offer one possible model for community-based training in language documentation and conservation that focuses on bidirectional learning and capacity building. We describe a training workshop that was held in 2018 in Kupang, the capital of Indonesia’s Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) province. A collaboration between the University of Hawai‘i, Leiden University, and Artha Wacana Christian University, this workshop implemented a model based on the practices of the Language Documentation Training Center (LDTC), an organization devoted to training speakers to document their own languages. We detail the NTT workshop itself, summarize post-workshop feedback, and offer suggestions to others looking to provide similar training in speaker communities. 

Abstract Absolute spatial orientation systems are pervasive and diverse among Austronesian languages, and decades of research has suggested that such systems are motivated at least in part by environmental and cultural factors. In this paper, we take a quantitative approach to the study of orientation systems by presenting the results of an exploratory multifactorial analysis of spatial orientation systems across 131 Austronesian languages, representing nearly all available data on orientation systems for the family. We analyze these data using multinomial logistic regression to uncover correlations between orientation type and four predictor variables representing cultural and environmental factors: geographic distribution, economy, geography (proximity to the sea), and ruggedness of terrain. Our model suggests that while not entirely predictive of the type of orientation system, the factors geography and economy alone account for much of the variation among spatial orientation systems in our sample, supporting a “weak” form of the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457–491). Additionally, this study demonstrates the potential of quantitative analytical methods for exploring the relationship between culture, environment, and spatial orientation systems.