Documentation and description of endangered languages has traditionally been the purview of academic linguists, while preservation and revitalization are often viewed as being of greater interest to speech community members. Viewing them as disparate activities can create an artificial hierarchy wherein support for revitalization is seen as secondary to and derivative of documentation. In this talk, I argue instead for an integrative approach that reframes the endeavors as equal, simultaneous, and non-derivative. Reframing the relationship from sequential to concurrent is essential to creating a more robust corpus that better meets the needs of all stakeholders.

Case-study examples from my own fieldwork illustrate the positive impacts of working with community partners to set mutually beneficial goals from the outset of a project. For example, members of the Kari'nja community of Konomerume have begun a revitalization project that includes a teaching component. While planning curriculum, teachers and I struggled to understand the difference between three constructions that native speakers identified as functionally interchangeable (1), (2), 0.

On further investigation, I discovered that the forms were under-described in existing literature. This eventually led to a more thorough description of the three constructions, as well as a way to teach them. The description is now part of a bigger typological work AND teachers are better able to convey aspects of the language in use. Had I been focused solely on documentation Lenguas caribe de Venezuela and description to the exclusion of revitalization, I may not have become aware of or may have overlooked this gap in existing descriptions of the language.

Both formal teaching and academic description were enriched by supporting revitalization concurrently with documentation. Teaching curricula, lessons, and other such materials, thus, are not viewed as products to be delivered as an academic linguist's “giving back” to a speech community, but instead are integral to maximally useful documentation.