Endangered languages in contact: A multilingual spoken corpus for language documentation and research

University Of Georgia Research Foundation Inc, Athens GA

Investigators

Abstract

This project documents and analyzes a group of endangered language varieties spoken in a linguistically diverse border region, which have developed in contact with one another for hundreds of years. It also examines the specific situation of endangered dialects in contact with closely related varieties, which have been unduly ignored in research on language endangerment. This project will therefore provide us with important information that can help us understand fundamental issues of language variation and change, and will make theoretical contributions that are generalizable to other language-contact situations. Documentation of understudied and endangered languages is important for the preservation of cultural knowledge and for the advancement of scientific theories about human language. Endangered languages need to be studied in their broader ecological context in order to better understand the processes of language contact, maintenance, and shift: this includes the psychological context (the interaction of different varieties in the minds of bi- or multilingual speakers) and the sociological context (the specific relations among minoritized varieties and their interactions with standard languages, and how these different varieties function within society as mediums of communication). The project creates an online searchable spoken corpus that will allow for the quantitative analysis of language variation and code-switching practices by multilingual speakers. It leverages existing resources to develop an open-source pipeline for processing and annotating multilingual data from under-resourced varieties. The corpus interface will be built as a Shiny application, which can be adapted for use with other corpora and which allows many other possibilities for data visualization and statistical analysis, since it uses the popular R software environment. The web interface will also be designed to facilitate use by non-specialists, in order to make these data accessible to members of the local communities who are interested in the linguistic and cultural heritage of the region or in language maintenance and revitalization. This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program. 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.