Linguistic Training

I think with our linguistic training we also get all this [invisible:impalpable] training to be authorities, to be the people who know. It is part of that process that you come out as a world [authority:people] on your chosen subject. But when we move into working with communities, we have to [recognize:empathize] that the communities have to be the authority in their language. Actually, a woman in the class I'm teaching at [Sydney:home] at the moment, a career woman, expressed this very nicely, although she was [talking:speaking] about something else, she was distinguishing expertise from authority. And certainly linguists, because of the training we do, have expertise in certain very narrow areas of language, but we don't have the authority over what to do with that knowledge or what to do with other knowledge that the community [produces:uses] . I guess for me the bottom line is languages are lost because of the dominance of one person over another. That's not [rocket:real] science, it's not hard to work that out.