Workshop: Multilingualism, Contact and Documenting Endangered Languages

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Many of the world's languages are understudied and under-described, and we are facing the loss of a great many of them over the course of this century, a situation more generally known as language endangerment. Linguists are currently interested in documenting, describing and analyzing them while there are still speakers who know the languages. The documentation of endangered languages has to date primarily focused on the creation of monolingual documentary corpora, and yet it is well-known that language endangerment is primarily due to shift in the face of language contact, and not due to catastrophic weather, natural disaster or war. This grant supports a workshop to train linguists in documenting language contact and multilingualism, with special focus on endangered languages. The workshop will bring together specialists in the field who have both experience and are using innovative methods, to provide a forum for training and discussion of issues, methodologies, and best practices. Broader impacts include wider development and dissemination of cutting edge methodologies in language documentation, presentations of current research by early career faculty, and the ability to accommodate a significant audience likely to include graduate students and other participants. A particular practical application in better knowledge of multilingual settings is in speech technology, with direct benefits to society as a whole. The communities of speakers of these languages will also benefit from a better understanding of how they use more than one language in their daily lives. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (the professional society of linguists in the US) in 2019 in New York City, so as to be accessible to a wide range of linguists and students. Linguists need to document language contact in process, to better understand the linguistic processes that take place in the course of language shift, the kinds of language changes that occur, to provide insights into directionality and rates of change, and the roles of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors involved in language shift. Improving scientific methods of documentation has long-term benefits for linguists, anthropologists, other academics and endangered language communities. To improve these methods requires some retraining and refocusing of goals, and one step toward this is a workshop that enables active engagement of the linguistic community in the formulation of these goals. The workshop will result not only in new methodologies for documenting language contact, but will critically help to reshape the kinds of research questions that we presently ask. It will have three basic parts: (1) consideration of the state of multilingualism in endangered language ecologies; (2) a focus on tools and methods for transcribing, annotating, analyzing and presenting multilingual corpora; and (3) the use of experimental methods in documenting and studying language contact in process.