Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Bettina Gartner, Oliver Streiter
4.3 Methodology of research
In order to comprehend the whistled language not only from a linguistic and bioacoustic point
of view but as a whole cultural system it is necessary to examine the way of life and the
circumstances in which the whistled languages exist. Therefore interviews (oral history) and
monitoring (e.g. participating at the whistling-lectures at La Gomera) are needed. The analysis
of local newspapers and magazines as well as historical archives should complement other data
collection.
For the documentation of whistled languages multi-media sequences, transcriptions and
translations can be freely stored in the “Natural Language Resource Description Framework”
(NLRDF) built at the National University of Kaohsiung and European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen
by Oliver Streiter and Mathias Stufl esser. But for a better understanding of these languages it
will also be necessary to register besides the pure whistles also fi lm-records and pictures which
show how, when and where whistles are used, as has become standard in the digitalization and
archiving of non-whistled languages.
Extending the linguistic database XNLRDF (Streiter / Stufl esser 2005) by a GIS we will be
in state to map the available linguistic data and the collected socio-cultural data on available
and free GIS data on economic systems, population density, religion, and the geographical
properties to explore the possible reasons which gave rise to the whistling of languages. The
scientifi c approach of analysing and comparing whistled languages will thus for the fi rst time
extend to sociological, cultural and historical characteristics of whistled languages and open a
vast and unique fi eld of research.
362
Multilingualism.indb 362 4-12-2006 12:28:49