COLLBORATIVE RESEARCH: CREATING AN AUDIO-VISUAL CORPUS OF SCOTTISH GAIDHLIG TO PRESERVE AND INVESTIGATE LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

Board Of Regents, Nshe, Obo University Of Nevada, Reno, Reno NV

Investigators

Abstract

Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language closely related to Irish and Welsh and more distantly to English, was once spoken across Scotland by most of the country's population. Today, however, Gaelic remains a community language only in the most remote regions of western Scotland. Gaelic speakers comprise about 1% of the Scottish population; the 2011 census found only 57,375 native speakers, compared to 250,000 a century earlier. This sharp decline makes the language's continued survival uncertain. Scottish Gaelic is of immense interest because it possesses many rare linguistic features, including initial consonant mutation where a word-initial consonant can be changed depending on the function of that word in a clause. Scottish Gaelic also exhibits pre-aspirated consonants, and verb-initial sentence structure. In addition, the language offers remarkable examples of how knowledge systems particular to local geography and climate (land management, fishing techniques) are imbedded in the language. Should Scottish Gaelic become extinct, the global community -- not just Scotland -- will lose an irreplaceable cultural and scientific resource. Through this two-year project, Professors Ian Clayton from the University of Nevada, Reno along with Andrew Carnie and Mike Hammond from the University of Arizona will create a corpus of linguistic interviews with 30 native Gaelic speakers. They will be assisted by native speaker Muriel Fisher, the recipient of the Linguistic Society of America's 2015 Excellence in Community Linguistics Award. The collection will contain more than twenty hours of high-quality audio-visual material, transcribed and translated and will include speech samples from speakers over range of ages, geographic origins, and professional backgrounds. The collection will offer an invaluable tool to help linguists expand their scientific study of this language's rare features. In addition, the interviews will focus on traditional occupations, folklore, and oral history-- the kinds of knowledge and terminology most at risk as Gaelic declines. When complete, the corpus will be publically available through the Max Planck Institute's Language Archive, and the University of Arizona's Open Repository.