Language Description and Documentation from the Native Speaker’s Point of View: The Case of the Tundra Yukaghir

This chapter discusses the responsibility of the field linguist to ‘give something back’ to the endangered language community (see Hugo, this volume). It will focus on what native speakers of that community need from the researcher, rather than on what the researcher may have decided to give to the native speakers. Nowadays ease of communication and transport make the often remote villages where these communities live more easily accessible and thus speeds up the task of sending materials back to them. Moreover, as will be discussed below, the development of new technologies for processing field data facilitates the task of making the data collected useful for the speech community.