EAGER: Training and Text Collection as a Vehicle for Recruiting and Retaining Endangered Language Fieldworkers

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world and linguists anticipate at least half of those will go silent by the end of the current century. A key intellectual challenge is thus documenting the language and associated scientific knowledge before the 3,000 threatened languages cease to be spoken. This project addresses the challenge using an exploratory modification of a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)-style model focused on students at or near the onset of graduate study in linguistics. The focus on early-career linguists is intended to shape their research trajectories and produce continuing long-term research results as the project participants advance in their graduate and post-graduate careers and in turn train others. The project has the potential to increase the number of linguistic specialists in the United States focusing on underdocumented and endangered languages, an increase in technical capacity serving the national interest by keeping U.S. institutions at the forefront of scientific research on endangered languages. The project will recruit and train post-baccalaureate linguists in fieldwork methodology and language documentation. It will also enlist a postdoctoral researcher into the project. Second, the project will also result in documentation for multiple underdocumented and endangered languages, directly advancing scientific knowledge via the archived collection of texts from multiple endangered languages. These texts will provide researchers with a large corpus of connected natural speech, which will help to reveal grammatical properties of the languages, especially those where sentence structure (syntax) and pronunciation (phonology) interface, which has been shown from cross-linguistic investigations to display considerable complexity. Broader impacts include the training and mentoring of linguists from underrepresented groups, the fostering of international collaborations, and international research and fieldwork experience for early-career (post-baccalaureate and post-doctoral) scholars. Led by two faculty from the University of California, Los Angeles and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, this project will develop a pipeline of junior scholar linguists working on African languages and new collaborations with African communities through the mechanism of in situ field research experiences in Ghana, resulting in actual, quality language documentation. The first phase will target "early career" graduate and prospective graduate students with interests in African languages, leveraging the 2018 Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang 2018) to train students in the technical aspects of language documentation. This will be followed in the second phase by hands-on training in which the participants will work directly with members of four endangered language communities in Ghana, targeting the North Guang or Ghana-Togo Mountain languages. The entire project team will work one-on-one with speakers and record, transcribe, translate and analyze a collection of texts, which will come from a number of genres, such as folktales, personal reminiscences, family histories, and children's stories. These efforts will augment the existing literature on the targeted languages in terms of their lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological properties, as these languages are generally underdocumented, or even undocumented. Narratives involve speech in context, and are likely to show syntax-phonology interface effects, as well as other grammatical structures of interest. Moreover, the documentation will be a permanent record of important cultural and historical information, having broad applicability across fields and serving as the basis for future work on the languages.