Modern South Arabian: Conducting Field work in Dhofar, Mahrah and Eastern Saudi Arabia

In this paper, we discuss conducting community-based fieldwork with speakers of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) in southern Oman, eastern Yemen and eastern Saudi Arabia for a Leverhulme-funded project: The Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the languages, their varying degrees of language endangerment, and the traditional lifestyle of their speakers. In section 2 we discuss the decline and erosion of the languages, and the rationale this provides not only for documenting the languages, but also for closely involving native speakers and community members in the data collection, transcription, translation, analysis, and dissemination. This vital community participation is considered in section 3, which also includes a description of the equipment we used, the software packages and the orthography devised for the project. We describe the collection of audio, audio-visual and photographic material, file identification and metadata, identifying speakers, obtaining ethical consent, training community participants, analysing and archiving the data, and the project website. Section 4 discusses language revitalisation and the joint dissemination of research.