Endangered Language Research and the Moral Depravity of Ethics Protocols

At the 2nd International Conference on Endangered Languages in Kyōto in December 2001, a field linguist from Siberia and I both independently warned an international audience of linguists and policy makers about the perils of ethics protocols for endangered language research which had begun to take shape at that time (van Driem 2004). Our warnings were not heeded and some of the foretold absurdities have since then materialized. Most of the then new ethics protocols that were suddenly being drawn up, just as endangered language research came back into mainstream linguistic fashion in the 1990s, are not just misguided constructs dreamt up by do-gooder bureaucratic busybodies.