In response to a crescendo of public and scholarly interest, over the last two decades there has been a noticeable and mostly welcome surge in publications that focus on language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. Early and high impact contributions in Hale et al. (1992) included a now seminal article by Michael Krauss which called for urgent action to prevent linguistics from going down in history as the ‘only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated’ (Krauss 1992:10). There then followed a discussion on the topic by Ladefoged (1992) and a prompt reply by Dorian (1993) that situated the issue of language endangerment as one deserving of sustained academic attention. Alongside swelling bookshelves that speak to the urgency of this work, major research programs funded by private philanthropic organizations and research councils were also being established at this time. The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) was founded in 1995, followed a year later by the Endangered Language Fund (ELF). With the establishment of the Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen program (DoBeS) in 2000, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) in 2002, and the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program funded by the US government in 2005, the last two decades bear witness to a steady increase in support, funding, and visibility for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages.

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This paper examines the use of the ablative case clitic in locative phrases in Iraqw, a South Cushitic language of Tanzania. In the typological classification of locative marker syncretisms, Iraqw has been classified as a language with a Source=Location≠ Goal pattern. This pattern is extremely rare in languages of the world and has been argued to be unattainable. The Iraqw ablative case clitic has been reported as both source and location marker. New data shows that the directional case clitic, a goal marker, appears on locative constructions as well, but that it is used to express purpose rather than location. The data also shows that the ablative case clitic is found mainly in locational clauses with a main verb with a durative aspect. Based on this, I argue that in locative constructions, the ablative clitic expresses duration rather than location and I propose the reanalysis of the ablative marker in locative phrases as a durational marker. The notion of location does not need to be expressed overtly, but is a zero-marker. Therefore, the rare Source=Location≠ Goal pattern is no longer valid for Iraqw, and instead I propose the pattern Source≠ Location≠ Goal, which is common in languages of the world.

This chapter demonstrates the validity of crowdsourced data by comparing the crowdsourced data from the VinKo project with traditionally collected data from the AThEME project. Both datasets target non-standard language varieties of the South Tyrol, Trentino, and Veneto regions in north-eastern Italy. Three different morphosyntactic phenomena are discussed, each relating to a particular language variety, providing evidence that the crowdsourced data is of comparable quality to the traditionally gathered data and has the added advantage of yielding a larger overall dataset covering a denser location network.