Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties

Loss of linguistic diversity is viewed by many as one of the great ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, and the Romance language family has not been spared. This chapter deals with unique challenges to the study and documentation of endangered Romance languages. We consider the question of language vs dialect, and the added problems faced by endangered varieties deemed "dialects". The role played by the highly prestigious and structurally related national languages of the countries in which the endangered varieties are spoken is analysed within the fieldwork context, as speakersmaypossess a spectrum of linguistic abilities, from the national standard to an archaic local variety. Fieldwork methods and language documentation/description are discussed, along with the types of resources produced and their accessibility.