Documenting a Creole: Aligning Research Goals with Community Goals

This article explores a community-based approach to language documentation in a multilingual, creole-speaking environment. Cavite Chabacano is a highly endangered creole spoken in the Philippines, and its speakers mostly belong to the grandparental generation. In order to ensure its documentation and explore possible new paths to revitalization that go beyond documentation, this study takes as its point of departure the perspectives of community members and locates them in dialog with those of academic researchers. The authors explore large community workshops as a format to identify documentation methods and goals that community members find most accurate, among which a standardized orthography was mentioned. The data are analyzed from a nexus discourse analytical perspective, which helped uncover how community members co-constructed the community and negotiated the past and future of their language.