The Grammar of Surmiran Rumantsch

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

What is lost when a language dies? Languages are becoming extinct at a much higher rate than biological species, and each time this happens, the connection of a people with their history, traditional knowledge and cultural heritage is severed. Each language is a unique combination of the possibilities offered by the human language faculty, and each language that dies reduces the evidence available for the nature of that faculty. Many of the world's endangered languages are those of tribal peoples in remote places, but many more are spoken right alongside what we think of as major languages. Indeed, this very proximity is a major reason, in many cases, for the endangered status of local or minority languages. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Stephen Anderson will carry out field studies of Surmiran, one of five major forms of Rumantsch in Switzerland. Intense linguistic pressure from speakers of Italian and especially German makes it extremely difficult for the 3,000 or so speakers of this language to maintain their Rumantsch identity. The language has a number of features that make it quite important, though, both for the study of Romance languages and for linguistic theory more generally. For example, Rumantsch is the only modern Romance language that consistently requires the verb of the sentence to appear in second position, in a way similar to (but subtly different from) German. Surmiran has a system of weak (or "clitic") pronouns that appear together with a full expression referring to the subject under complex conditions related to a number of other grammatical properties. The language also has sound types that are quite unusual both in themselves and in the ways they form groups (or clusters). In every area of its grammar, Surmiran Rumantsch has something to show us about the range of possibilities for human language that we might well never know if the language disappeared before it could be investigated. This project will provide documentation of the features of the language at several levels. For linguists, technical analyses of its peculiarities and their relevance to important theoretical issues will bring a new set of data into discussion in the field. For speakers of the language, a grammatical description will be provided which can play a role in language courses in the educational system, as well as providing a convenient reference. It is often the case that the mere fact of devoting scientific attention to an endangered language can have the effect of awakening pride and interest in the community, as they realize that their language is not simply a marginal "dialect" but a special and valuable kind of knowledge, structurally as rich and varied as those with more prestige, and especially valuable to them as the vehicle in which their own culture is expressed. In addition to providing resources to these two communities, linguists on the one hand and Surmiran speakers on the other, this project will also provide opportunities for graduate students to participate directly in research with both a basic and an applied character.