Documentation of discourse and cultural activities to advance scientific knowledge of an endangered tonal language

Gettysburg College, Gettysburg PA

Investigators

Abstract

The world's estimated 7,000 languages are disappearing at an increasingly rapid rate. Parallel to language loss is the disappearance of cultural and economic activities. The present project, part of a long-term multidisciplinary effort, will emphasize video documentation to enhance a language documentation project that focuses on highly endangered cultural activities particularly prone to loss. This has the potential to increase scientific understanding of the spatial and motion components of grammar and to generate a valuable corpus of the distribution of complex tonal properties in narrative and other grammatical contexts. With up to 21 tonal contrasts on a single disyllabic sequence, Yoloxochitl Mixtec (YM), the language documented in this project, has one of the most extensive tonal inventories in any reported language. This inventory that carries great functional weight both lexically (distinguishing words) and morphologically (marking both derivational and inflectional processes), providing opportunities to deepen scientific advances both in terms of YM tone and cross-linguistic studies of complex tone systems. Broader impacts include the training of a US undergraduate in video documentation of endangered indigenous cultures. Additionally, annotated videos will be disseminated through Internet venues (e.g., Vimeo and YouTube). The entire subtitled corpus will serve as an educational resource for US high school and college students, especially those from diasporic Mexican Indigenous communities here in the US. In addition, video documentation will enhance intercultural understanding and has significant educational value for the community and the general public. The language and cultural and economic activities that will be documented are from Yoloxochitl, state of Guerrero, Mexico. The project continues the documentation of YM, a highly complex tonal language in which little comparative work has been done on this prosodic feature. The present project on YM will create the first extensive audio corpus of Mixtec lemmas (headwords). Video documentation will enable a focus on activities that are best documented and understood through audiovisual recordings. Visual imagery most effectively captures varied processes (e.g., preparation of plant material) and movements (e.g., the relationship between language and gesture; the documentation of manual skills) that would remain opaque in textual or simple audio descriptions. Moreover, the lexicon of a given language is connected to activities that must be conceptualized if the words themselves are to be understood. The expert team will record with two cameras (one stationary and one mobile) to allow the complete recording of each process while yielding footage for the creative editing of short vignettes on each activity. All footage as well as the final videos will be transcribed in YM, translated into English and Spanish, disseminated, and archived. It will serve as a primary source in an under-documented group of language for future comparative work on over three dozen recognized Mixtec languages while allowing acoustic analysis of the high number of tonal contrasts. Additionally, the focus on semantic domains involving ritual performance and material culture production will provide highly nuanced data of often archaic material in the linguistic and anthropological realm. The results of this project will be of value to linguists in a range of specialties (typologists, Oto-Mangueanists, historical linguists, tonologists, and semanticists) as well as to anthropologists studying Mesoamerican language and culture. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.