Hi Hussein,
This is a big question and I am not expert enough to give you any
definitive answer but here are a few quick thoughts:
1. Some level of skill is needed, either in linguistics or in the
language. But there are a lot of cases of linguists from outside a
speech community and no knowledge of a language coming in to document
it. So the simple answer is probably "no" to a requirement to be a
native/fluent speaker.
2. In cases of languages with little study done on them, maybe the bar
is lower. Certainly there have been cases of non-experts doing a lot
of work to understand and record a language that no one else was
working on.
Personally I think that a native speaker and a non-speaker bring
different perspectives to the process, and that training is important
but so is love of the work and the language.
Hopefully there will be other responses...
Don
--- In AfricanLanguages@yahoogroups.com, Hussein Saeed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> Dear Friends,
> Do I need to be a native or fluent speaker of a language in order
to start documenting and describing it?What is the difference between
describing and documenting a language?I understand that any effort in
language description is a step forward in documenting it.
> Yours,
> Hussein Saeed.
>
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