Doctoral Dissertation Research: Spoken Language Variation in Chanka, an Endangered Language

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Social and linguistic factors related to standard language ideologies have been found to affect the patterning of linguistic variables in well-known languages. However, in indigenous speech communities, it is not well understood whether the same factors predict variation in the same way, given that social factors (especially education-related ideologies) can be quite different. This project investigates which factors constrain variation in an endangered indigenous language of South America. The documentation will form the core material to be analyzed in a doctoral dissertation. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings, transcriptions, and metadata, as well as community training in data collection and linguistic analysis. Results from this work thus directly encourage language maintenance by empowering community-driven documentation and facilitating the creation of accurate pedagogical materials. Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez, a doctoral candidate at New York University, will conduct and analyze sociolinguistic interviews in the Chanka variety of Quechua, spoken in Peru. Studying Chanka offers insight into how sociolinguistic theories apply to situations where indigenous languages are rarely appropriate for education or formal domains, and where speakers have varied fluency in the majority language (Spanish). While endangered, Chanka continues to be a vital code for many speakers, thus allowing documentation of the language in actual use. This project will develop a transcribed corpus of approximately 64 hours of sociolinguistic interviews with speakers in four communities, selected as proxies for differences in Spanish fluency, ruralness, and education. Traditional variationist qualitative methods, often involving reading tasks, are adapted as audiovisual activities to determine how non-literate speakers evaluate different ways of speaking. The quantitative analysis focuses on rates of use of both a phonological variable that is the object of conscious correction (the uvular phoneme), and morphosyntactic variables below the level of speaker awareness (word order and related determiners and case marking). 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.