 Okay. Welcome everyone. Again, I'm Joey Dovstrand, postdoctoral fellow at SOAS and today we're excited to have Pais Sukumbu with us to share about his work and his own viewpoints on his work and how we should be approaching language documentation with us today. Pais is a Alexander von Humboldt researcher at the University of Hamburg in Germany. His research there is focused on Grassfield Bantu languages of Cameroon. And this is an extension of work that he's been doing on his own language of Banki. And so Pais comes to us with experience as an insider researcher working with his own language community, the community he grew up with. He also has experience as an outsider researcher as well. We did his PhD at the University of Younday in Jim, setting the technology of the language, Bantu language of East Cameroon. So within the same passport country, but I think culturally very different from his own homeland. And so we're really excited to hear from you about the variety of experiences that you've had and what you're able to share with us today. So I'll give the floor over to you for about the next 30 or 40 minutes and then ask people to hold their questions to the end. If you do think of a question that you want to put into the chat, you can go ahead and write it there. And we'll come back to a question and answer at the end. So Pais, thank you for joining us and we look forward to hearing what you have to share. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Joe. Thanks for organizing this and for giving me the opportunity to participate and to share my views. And I wish to thank everyone who is with us this afternoon. Thank you for making time to join us. Yeah, participating in the discussions. As we continue to look forward to a post-COVID-19 time when it will be possible to do fieldwork again and continue language documentation, I thought we could intensify reflections on how language documentation actors can contribute to the empowerment of target community members. And so I would then be sharing if I share my screen. Okay, so we will be talking on language documentation and the empowerment of target community members. And I would first of all begin with a brief introduction. Then I will talk about the task of language documentation specialist. I'll talk about the objectives of funding agencies. I'll talk about the needs of target community members. Then I'll talk about our proposed community-based approach to the empowerment of target community members. Then I will provide a brief conclusion. So what is really the rationale for this thought that I'm bringing for us to reflect on? What is the rationale for the empowerment of target community members through language documentation? What makes me think we should be considering this as language documentation specialist? I think I think first of all, if we have interest in language, it seems to me right there we should have interest in the speakers of the language. And I think if we have interest in protecting and preserving linguistic and cultural diversity, then we should have interest in the well-being of agents of the diversity. Or if we have interest in as linguists, if we want to develop a career, one who have interest in academic and career development, we should think of the development of the speakers of those languages that we analyze and which facilitated our career development. These are the reasons, some of the reasons why I think we should be thinking of how to empower target community members as language documentation specialists. Now, due to the diversity of the audience, I would like to first of all begin by talking about the task of language documentation specialist. What does the linguist who engages in language documentation strive to achieve? And two main things, language documentation and language description. And regarding language documentation, we know the effort is to create a lasting multi-purpose record of the language. And here my mind has put it very clearly in these words, a language documentation who strives to include as many and as varied records as practically feasible, covering all aspects of the set of the interrelated phenomena commonly called a language. Ideally then, a language documentation would cover all registers and varieties, social or local. It would contain evidence for language as a social practice, as well as a cognitive faculty. It would include specimens of spoken and written language. So the language documentation specialist tries to capture as much of the language as much of these as possible. Also, the linguist is interested in language maintenance. So in creating the lasting multi-purpose documentation, we see this as a major linguistic response to high levels of language endangerment observed in current times. So the process is meant to create important resources to support language maintenance. And also research economy. So language documentation and archiving creates data repositories for scientific inquiries. So as we do language documentation and archive the products of documentation, then we make available much data that other scientists can exploit. Now the language description is one of the main aims of linguists. And we know that many linguists do solid linguistic descriptions while others focus on theoretical developments. We also know that many language documentation projects produce grammars, dictionaries, and so on. Also, we know that most linguists have the desire to make their linguistic products available to target community members. And I have said elsewhere before that if linguistic research on endangered languages does not arouse interest in maintenance and revitalization, or if research outputs do not actually reach the target language community, then the research has only been completed partially. So we have this desire when we do language description. We have the desire to have the community give back, to bring back the linguistic products that we produce to the community of speakers we work on. And to see that linguists have that desire for their descriptions to benefit the communities, I looked at some grammars of Cameroonian languages and I found that most writers of grammars have the desire to see their grammars benefit the community members in some ways. And so the grammar of Bafut, for example, Kamanji writes that he makes the description as simple as possible in order to make the book accessible to all categories of language practitioners who are interested in the Bafut language and in related grassroots Bantu languages. I also look at the grammar of Babanki. I was involved in writing this and we try to present it in a way that it will be useful to the learners and teachers of the language as well as to others interested in this and other grassroots Bantu languages. I looked at the grammar of, excuse me, of Mukwe and at Tindobi 2013 hopes that the Bakuri children who are no longer speaking their language due to the exclusive reign of our language in English as an unavoidable lingua franca of the Saroese region as well as English and French as the two official languages of Cameroon were finding the grammar useful. The Nizadi grammar, Korean, Haiman and Koum, wish that the grammar would be of use to scholars of different sorts and ultimately the Nizadi community as well. This is to say that in writing grammars, lingus have in mind the community of speakers of the language they describe and then the question one like to ask is do these communities actually benefit from this linguistic descriptions and to answer this question I did a study and examined three main issues concerning the grammars of five Cameroonian languages. So I checked Akose, Babanqui, Bafut, Mukwe and Oku and the issues I focused on were awareness of the existence of the grammar. So of course I sought to ask people whether they know that the grammar of their language has been written. Secondly, whether they have a copy of the grammar if they know that grammar has been written and thirdly whether they are able to read the grammar. And I did this study with 750 speakers from these five communities and I checked not just people in the community itself but also in the diaspora areas of Cameroon where speakers of these languages are found and I found that of the 750 people up to 59.3% categorically said there is no grammar, the grammar of the language has not been written 59.3 and 23.7 people said they have no idea and only 17% that is 128 out of 750 people said they know that the grammar of their language has been written. So I asked the 17% whether they own a copy of the grammar and 89.8% of them said they do not own a copy and only 10.2% said they own a copy and a good number of these people had received the copies of the grammar from the authors. So it's not like they bought them, they ordered them somewhere, they received from the authors. Then I asked the 10.2% about their ability to read the grammar and up to 85% of them said they could manage to read with a lot of difficulty because of the tone marks, because of unfamiliar sounds like the villain, Neza, which are not found in the English language that the people are familiar with and only 15% said they could read with ease and these two persons were actually university lecturers of linguistics, so they could read. That is to say that even though the grammar writers have the interest of the community at heart, the desire to see their grammar serve the community in some way, it really doesn't happen that much. There are a few communities where literacy projects are running, such as Acose, most of these figures here are a little bit high because most of the people, Acose speakers, where literacy work has been going on for several years, decades really actually said they are aware of the work that is going on in the language and also of the grammar written by Robert Headinger. So next let's look at the objectives of funding agencies. Yeah, the linguist wants to do that, but to do the funding agencies wish to achieve and to do this, I checked the websites of a few agencies that fund language documentation work. Yeah, this was a linguistic webinar, so I began with the ELDP and on the website it reads that the ELDP wishes to support the documentation of as many endangered languages as possible to encourage fieldwork on endangered languages, create a repository of resources for linguistics, the social sciences, and the language communities themselves and to make the documentary collections freely available. At least it's interesting to see, of course, that ELDP things of creating a repository of resources for the language communities themselves. Later on we'll see how this repository is useful to language communities. And I checked the documenting endangered languages supported by the National Endowment for Humanities and the National Science Foundation and their aim is to support fieldwork and other activities relevant to recording, documenting, and achieving and archiving endangered languages, including the preparation of lexicons, grammars, examples, databases. I checked also the foundation for endangered languages and the objectives is that to raise awareness of endangered languages both inside and outside the communities where we have spoken through all channels and media, support the use of endangered languages in all contexts at home in education in the media and social, cultural, and economic life, monitor linguistic policies and practices and to seek to influence the appropriate authorities when necessary, support the documentation of endangered languages by offering financial assistance training of facilities for the publication of results, collect and make available information for use in the preservation of endangered languages and disseminate information on all of the above activities as widely as possible. Very, very lofty objectives, very nice and but the idea here is that all of these objectives of all the funding agencies focus on the language, the focus on language, but not on the speakers of the language. And that's where I'm driving to say that we should not only have interest in the speakers in the language, but also in the speakers. Now, do language communities have needs? Do they have development needs? Of course, the members of communities in which language documentation is carried out have various different needs. Just that the list, we can't possibly establish a list because each community will have its peculiar needs. But we know, for example, that language always desire to leave something in the community in a way, it's a way of fulfilling some need of the community. So they leave something like a dictionary, grammar, literacy materials, and so on. And the linguist sees this as meeting the needs of the community, some need of the community by leaving something in the community. But if the communities, if they have development needs, who should be responsible for this? Whose responsibility? If people have development needs, then what? Who should be responsible for this? Should it be the linguist? Should the linguist provide for the development needs of the community while also paying consultants? In some cases, it's not clear whether payment is really sufficient or not. But since the linguist gets to a community and in many cases pays, the consultants should be then bother any longer about the development needs of the community. And should the funding agency care about the development of remote communities where endangered languages are spoken? Should they care just about preserving the languages? Or should they care about developing those remote area communities in some ways? And what I think in response to these questions is for many, many, and I know many of the people in the audience have done fieldwork probably in remote areas. And usually when we see how the communities are, we usually see that people really have needs, really have development needs. And if we see this, it's people cannot, people are hardly insensitive to this because we see that there is some really need for something. And you see, in many cases, people try to meet the needs in some ways. So even if it is not the direct responsibility of linguists, we sometimes, as we think about it, they will find possibilities to be able to help these communities somehow. And how I think this can be done is through what I call a community-based approach to empowerment of other community members. We know that the community-based approach to language documentation has been, is largely accepted as the best approach to follow because it emphasizes collaboration between linguists and language communities. It encourages research on the language conducted for, with and by the language-speaking community within which the research takes place, which it affects. And Rice says community-based research begins with the research topic of practical relevance to the community and is carried out in community settings. Second, community members and researchers share control of the research agenda through active and reciprocal involvement in the design implementation and dissemination. And finally, the process results can transform and mobilize diverse ideas, resources and experiences to generate positive action for communities. So the community-based approach is quite acceptable. It's, and many people who do language documentation try to follow this approach, try to involve the community at stages of the research of the documentation. And so the question is, why should we adopt the community-based approach to empower target community members? Why should we do this? I think of at least two reasons. First, because the upside linguists cannot always know the needs of the target community. We can get to a community and really see what we think are needs for that community, but finding out from the community members we can be surprised at the least different kinds of needs that we did not even imagine. But also even community linguists like myself will have only a fairly good idea, because in many cases they also live outside of the community. So in the last 30 years I've not been able to live within the Babanki community for a full year. It's not possible. Maybe I would go for a few days, a few weeks, or months, a few months. And so it's the people who are in that locality who can actually say exactly what their needs are. But I know, for example, that Babanki people don't currently need dictionaries, they don't need language development instead. We need healthcare, roads, schools, and so on. And if these are in place, some of these things are put in place, then of course language development is seen as a necessity, because the people themselves understand the need to preserve, to develop their languages, to maintain the languages. But also they have more pressing current needs than language development. So implementing the community-based approach to impact our community members requires that the linguists, for example, consult community members to identify community needs. And then to integrate community development needs into the budget. So in my opinion, this kind of consultation should normally take place while the project has been drawn up. And then the community development needs identified together with the community would then be included in the budget. And then community members need to be involved in the execution of the project. And the linguists who have to prepare and train community members to maintain and sustain the development project after their language documentation project is over. Now, I think also of the funding agencies, what should they do? And as a community linguist and following all what I've said, I think that funding agencies need to allocate at least 10% of project funds can get community development. This is, yeah, the proposal and it's feasible. The funding agency can fund a language documentation project for $200,000, $300,000, $400,000. If the desire is there, they can have an additional 10% maybe for some community development project, which will not, it's not about developing every aspect of the community, but some specific aspect and 10% of the budget should go for that. And then the funding agency should ensure that grant applications demonstrate community input in identifying development projects. Just like they do when they find out whether it's been engagement of the community in pre prior contact with the community and so on. And also they should request detailed reports on project execution and sustainable plans, just like they do when projects at the end of projects or end of a year report on documentation progress is submitted. Also, the report on project execution, development project execution should be submitted. And this proposal for engagement, for the empowerment of target community members is not something that is not, this is something feasible, it's possible. And there are success stories, there are success stories, which I may not be aware of so many, as many as there are language documentation projects, even those in the audience today, I believe people have been engaged in empowerment of community members where they do language documentation, people have surely been engaged in several ways. But usually they have to go out of their way, look for funding elsewhere and so on in order to do this, but if these were integrated as part of the project from the very start, then things could be a little bit different. But there are some success stories, which I could share a few here. The first one I know, because I was involved in this project somehow, is a pick for picking initiative for the FAMCAM project in Lower Fungal, in Northwest Cameroon. This is a project run by Jeff Koot and Pierre Paolo and the idea is, you know, as you get to this community, quite difficult to travel to reach this area. And so the road network is really, really bad. And you get to this community and you see that there is really need for some development initiatives in this area. And then they ask the people what could be done to be of help somehow. And the people say they need their children to go to school. They want education for their children. And there is a school building, there is the government, they have said, okay, there is a school here, but they have not equipped the school, they are not paying the teachers, they have not sent any teachers there or anything. And the people say, okay, if we are able to raise pigs, we will be able to sell. If we raise a pig for each child, so pig for picking, pig for a child. If they are able to raise pigs, they can then sell those pigs and be able to pay teachers, be able to fund the education of their children somehow. And then this team decided to try it out. And I know that the initial stages were really successful. But unfortunately, the war that is going on in Cameroon then started and affected this area so much. And the people, most of the people in the area, the force to escape and to be now refugees in different places. But because of the connection that researchers and team have built with the community, they then go ahead to launch the Sunday Dress Funding Initiative, which again is to collect funds to help these people who are now refugees. So even though the project was kind of not running any longer, but the people, the project management team still have the interests of the people at heart, they have this connection with the people. And they continue to support the community somehow. So these are things that if originally the project had budgeted for community development, these things would be easier to do. So without doing any advert, if someone could follow this link and support this initiative, you could help these refugees. And also I think of the Water Supply Initiative, implemented by the Besen Language and Communication project. Besen is also a very difficult community locality to access. It's very, very difficult to get there. And the team of researchers, we get there. I was in this team, we get there. And the only source of water is a river that runs across the village, the river Katina that runs across this area. And this is where people get water for drinking, for cooking, and for everything. This is the only source of water. And for us, we have to go with go with potable water from the city. And then one of the project leaders ever linked for us. But this is this is really impossible. How do people survive without potable water? And then she goes an extra mile looking for funding to fund the Water Supply project, which was eventually done and handed over to the community. So community empowerment is something that several links are doing in different ways. And the idea is if funding agencies can take this into consideration and, you know, budget for community empowerment, a lot can happen. So with that, I will give some concluding remarks. First, to say who really benefits from community development during language documentation. And my answer is that the founders served. They do not only contribute to the development of knowledge, maintenance, and preservation of languages, but also have the opportunity to contribute to the development of the communities where the languages are spoken. Of course, one cannot say why would they have interest in the development of the communities, because they have interest in the languages spoken in those communities. Secondly, the researchers themselves would again not only contribute to the development of knowledge, maintenance, preservation of languages, but also to the development of the communities where the languages are spoken. And in addition, they will pave the way for future generations to access communities without any resistance. In many cases, in some cases, a researcher gets to the field and people say, oh, there were some people who came here some years ago, collected, recorded things, and then disappeared. And we never heard anything from them again. We don't know what they did. You are coming again, you know, but in an event where there is some community project that was done for the entire community, because when you pay consultants, you pay individuals. It's not something for the community. And the effect of the payment doesn't go to the entire community. The benefit is not the entire community. And then people are kind of resistant when field researchers come to the area again. People are reluctant. And in many cases, then the researcher has a hard time and has to pay more so to get people to accept, to receive them. But in communities where projects have been running, some project has been left by a previous researcher. People may even go to an extra level of asking when are you coming again? And people want researchers to come to the community. So running a community project opens the way, makes access to future researchers in those communities. So for the communities, as I said, many communities, they see some linguists as people who come and mine their precious resources and disappear without leaving them with anything concrete. But if a project is implemented, then it gives a better sense of the work linguists do in these communities. So my final statement would be that language documentation activities should include the empowerment of community members. So development products should follow a community-based approach to identify the needs, request and allocate appropriate funds, then execute your project. And this will make language documentation efforts more meaningful and beneficial to all involved, that is the funding agencies, the linguists and the target community members. So with that, I'll end here and then it's here what people think. It's something for reflection and for us to share ideas and see how we can move this forward. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. As we wait for questions to come in, you can either write your question in the chat or raise your hand or let me know if you want to ask a question in person. Just to get us started, let me ask you a question, maybe about one of the less controversial parts of your proposal. Going back to what you started with looking at grammars and the usefulness of grammars. I wonder if it's helpful to make a distinction between reference grammars as these publications, a book in a particular format, which we should be quite honest, is fairly useful for the community of speakers. And I think that's true for English speakers and German speakers as well. These kind of publications aren't really part of our daily lives. But can we distinguish between the products versus the process of grammatical analysis and the knowledge that's acquired or consolidated in that process, which may have other uses if it's directed in different directions and just be more frank about our academic products may not have use, but the process that we engage in could have uses if we use other formats. Exactly. Yeah, I don't mean to say that all the linguistic work we do could serve the community in some way. There are certainly work that we do, which benefits the community of linguists, but not the community of speakers because that will not make any sense to them. But what I was really thinking about is yeah, people may benefit somehow. And I think there's a question from Julia in this regard whether these communities can benefit from language documentation in any way. Of course, yes, people, there are different levels, different kinds of work that we could do, which would certainly benefit the community in some way. Just we know revitalization efforts in the future would need linguistic work if the language happens to die out. So it's really certainly of benefit or what we do. It's really beneficial. Not even if not right now, but especially in the long run, the future of this would be of benefit and the advanced research into other areas of linguistics. So it's very useful what we're doing. But when we think of the immediate needs of the community, somehow, this is where I'm coming from immediate development needs. Yeah, so that's what I would say for now. Let me read out one of the questions that came in from Liliane. And then there's two hands raised from Jonathan and Luke. So we'll get to those next. The question from Liliane is, you talked about readable linguistic descriptions for communities. My question is, how could linguists write linguistic descriptions that are readable to communities and that at the same time remain scientifically of high quality? For example, how can we avoid technical terms like phonemes, LFOs, downstep, etc. That community members who are not linguists will certainly don't understand without the work losing its relevance. And Julia comments on that as well, wondering, is it not better to have multiple publications? And I know you've worked on this a bit trying to put together pedagogical grammars yourself. So how do you balance the academic quality and rigor with the ability for communities to understand the actual descriptions? Or do you not bother to try to bridge that gap? What's your approach? I think it's quite difficult to write a grammar in a way that it will be useful to the lay person in the community. It's quite difficult. And sometimes I think we linguists, we make that error of thinking that grammars are tools that should serve the community really. It's, in many cases, grammars would only serve the linguist. Maybe others who are highly educated and who can even read part of those grammars. For most of those less unknown languages, the community members mostly they don't have a reading culture or even if they can read, they will not, you know, no matter how you stratify it, you still need training to read the symbols that you use and so on. So at best one should dedicate their grammar to serve the linguistic community and then go ahead to prepare different kinds of publications, different kinds of materials for the community, simplified really materials for the community and then of course in communities where literacy work is going on, it's people receive training to read and write their language and then that becomes possible. But in most communities where there is no literacy work going on, there is no training to read and write, it's really, really difficult. And we should while trying to simplify the grammar as much as possible, we should produce different sets of materials for the community. Thanks, I'm going to go to Jonathan for his question. Thanks very much Joey and thank you Professor Akambu for your very interesting and insightful talk. I was struck by your call to funding agencies to, you know, you suggested building in 10% component into the research budget and I suppose, so as a sort of relatively early career person, I wondered in your experience and I'm talking from the United Kingdom context, but I mean obviously I understand you work elsewhere. Is it your understanding that funding agencies tend to be receptive or sensitive to those kind of budgeting requests? Often it can be quite opaque in terms of what funding agencies are prepared to fund in real terms and I wondered, have you sort of seen some success with this with funding agencies that you've dealt with and if you had any practical advice in terms of how you word that in a way that they might be receptive or sensitive to, because I think it's a very, very good idea and very pertinent obviously. Yeah, so far I haven't seen any funding agencies that, you know, budgets for communist development, I haven't seen it and so to me, if maybe somebody like, I don't think Mandana is here, but maybe she'll get to hear this, she'll get to see this discussion and maybe we can convince them that this is necessary, it's not happening and really for those who have been to the future, sometimes they get out of their budget to just try to make some needs for communist members, whereas if this were budgeted, you make things easier. It would just show that we don't only have interest, the funding agencies don't only have interest in the language people speak, but also in the well-being of the people somehow. I agree, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Luc, if you want to ask your question and I'll go back to some of the questions and comments in the chat. So, yes, very good. Thank you very much. Thank you, Piaz and welcome to London, even though you're not active in London, but it's a great talk. Thank you very much, very inspiring. Just a brief comment on the previous discussion. I think that's quite right. I think there has to be more discussion and change of the funding bodies and the agendas behind that. I think it's a slow change, but by having discussions in the community and pushing people in that direction, I think it's probably going to happen. And I think the big funders, I'm not sure, but smaller funders, like there's a small charity Firebird, I think they are called. They do language research as well, but they are quite open actually to community engagement more maybe than big research funders. But the question I had is a different one. And that is a topic of one, I guess, it's COVID-19. And I was wondering to what extent your experience and what you're saying and your agenda and the points you raise are related to the current situation we're in. The background is I have a small project with a small community in Kenya that I was supposed to meet with people last summer. And that it's a little bit like what you described. With community members, they started the project and then we met and talked. And I was very excited about it and we had preliminary meetings. But now it's become very difficult because travelling is no longer possible, but it's also in the community things have changed. And people have different worries at the moment. There's the COVID worry, there's the economic implications, there's travel restrictions within Kenya, there's the public health issues. So the whole agenda has changed a little bit. And I wonder whether you have experience like that and what your experience of that is. And also whether you think there's a long-term difference in the way we do linguistic research and field work coming out of COVID and whether that has a longer lasting effect. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for the remark and then the question. Which certainly we, as I said at the very beginning, we look forward to a time when it might be possible post COVID-19 time when it might be possible to do field work again. Normally it may not return to the way we knew it before. There's a lot of use of social media days to do some sort of data collection. It would be difficult to actually do exactly the kind of documentation that we would like to do if we are present from the side. So the wish is that things will return to normal but if the new normal becomes that we have to do more of social media documentation, language documentation through social media, we will certainly adjust in various ways. And what is sure is that communities face the challenges that you have faced. Communities even also have these kinds of worries. And a lot has changed not only in language linguistic work but also everywhere else. And we can only look forward to a time when we'll be able to do language documentation the way we can do it. But when that time comes, a desire, a wish is that funding agencies will make it possible for us to be able to integrate community development into our projects. Thank you. There's a comment here from Owen back to the question of if grammar can be made readable. So regarding the 85% of respondents who found it difficult to read the grammar in Cameroon, were any specific reasons identified for this? For example, the grammar was written in highly technical language or there were low levels of literacy among the particular respondents. I think you've touched on this a bit but can you go into some of the detail? Yeah, I would say there is a whole lot of factors that come into play. First, people don't have a reading culture. People in Cameroon don't have a reading culture. So we have a joke that if you need to keep some precious thing near a Cameroonian, you better just put it inside a book and maybe with them. But also, most of the grammars that we're talking about have been published abroad and they are far too expensive for people to try to buy. They are far too expensive. And even when people, if people had the money to buy somebody in Cameroon trying to buy a grammar book from Rudiger Cooper in Germany would really not do it because it has to be done online or so. So not just that it's expensive but the practical part, the logistical part of it is really difficult. And then people are not really interested in modatum literacy because in Cameroon it's still the foreign colonial languages that is English and French that are useful in education also in administration and so on. And the local languages are not promoted by they are not promoted and so people don't find any relevance in investing in those languages. So learning to read and owning a grammar of a Cameroonian language is not a priority to many people. So this could be some of the reasons. But in communities like Acose, Acose where there have been tickets, tickets of literacy work. You see people are really involved and know about the language and trying to preserve the language because of the efforts that have been put in over the years. Yeah. I've got some several comments in the chat from Peter Austin. So I just wanted to read a couple of those and give you a chance to react from them. The one I'll read first is a comment about benefits through the research process as there are potentially benefits that can derive from the process. For example, passing on literacy and technical skills like how to use equipment or generic skills that can be used in business or elsewhere. Also, if the researchers learn the language, this can demonstrate to speakers that their languages are learnable, interesting enough to outsiders that they want to speak them, as well as demonstrating respect and opening doors to better socio-cultural understanding, let alone inter-speaker right minutes. So there are just comments on how the methodology you choose could also have impacts on the community. Have you experienced some of that? I agree. Yeah. And I agree with all of that. This is right. There are several other benefits coming. In many cases, individuals, at the level of individuals, there are usually lots of benefits that language documentation projects bring to the community. But when you think at a community level, it's usually hard, although an individual can benefit and the benefit can spread into the community. But if there is, for example, a school or health facility or something, you see this kind of serves a broader base than those benefits that go to individuals. So there is a lot that people benefit from language documentation projects already. Peter talked a bit about other parts of the world where communities have enforced this kind of collaboration that you're talking about. So he said earlier, Indigenous communities in some places already have protocols in place, which mean that there is no alternative to what you're calling a quote community-based approach, where the research goals are established primarily by the members themselves. For example, average in Australia, first nations in Canada, there's not a choice for researcher. And he also shared a quote from the Vanuatu Cultural Research Protocol with a link in the chat, which is that research in practice is a collaborative venture involving researchers, individual and groups of informants, local communities, chiefs and community leaders, cultural field workers, culture administrative bodies, and local and national governments must be approached as such. So both at local and regional levels, there's been institutional requirements for this kind of collaboration. I guess you haven't experienced that kind of thing in Cameroon. I wonder what are your comments on trying to do that either at a local or sort of regional level? Not very much of that. So this is quite new and I'm grateful for those examples, those experiences. This is something I haven't observed in the Cameroon setting. So this is very helpful comments to have. Great. If anyone have a final question or comment they want to make before we end this session. I think there's plenty to continue to think about and discuss and bring more people into this discussion. Thank you so much, Fias, for preparing this, for sharing your experience with us, for willing to step out and make calls for changes as well in the way we think about our research and its funding. Thank you to everyone who joined us as well. Thank you for your questions and comments. I hope you've benefited from this time together. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much and thanks to everyone. And so you're wonderful comments. Thanks. Thanks, Joe. Thank you. Bye. Bye.