The workshop “Discussions on Legacy Materials (DiLegMa): Opportunities and Challenges for Descriptive Linguistics”, held at the Institut für Sprachwissenschaft (ISW) at the University of Bern on 24 and 25 April 2025 with support from the Van Riemsdjik Foundation, aimed to contribute to the rehabilitation of legacy materials in descriptive projects by offering a platform for exchange between descriptive linguists of various career stages who engage with legacy materials in different regions and in different frameworks. With its aim to engage with legacy materials, i.e. existing materials collected (often with a significant temporal and/or methodological distance from today) by other people (linguists, missionaries, laypeople etc.), the workshop inherently had a strong collaborative policy. Furthermore, the workshop was intended to provide an opportunity for junior researchers to acquire skills which are not part of a field linguist’s standard tool box or institutional training, but which are deemed to be ever more important in the years to come.
The presentations discussed a variety of topics, including specific documentation projects, the definition of legacy materials, methodological aspects (processing of legacy materials, data management, digitalization), sociological and historical backgrounds (origin, development, transmission, change and “survival” of legacy materials) as well as interaction with and integration of speaker communities and local stakeholders, i.e. descendants of consultants, into the investigation and usage of legacy material. Geographically, the presentations covered languages of Australia, North America, South Asia, Northeastern Europe, Corea, China and the Caucasus. With regard to career stages, the participants included senior scholars with decades of experience on legacy materials and language documentation, but also several junior researchers who are working with legacy materials for the first time in the context of a Ph.D. thesis or postdoctoral project.
We are confident that the workshop contributed to sharpening the awareness of legacy materials and to establishing legacy materials as adequate and visible data source for descriptive projects. Since the participants are working on a number of different language families and linguistic areas, we anticipate a relatively wide dispersion of the experiences and competences gained in the workshop and, as a consequence, a broader perception of the significance of legacy materials in different disciplines.