Collaborative documentation of an endangered language

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

This project creates a team of linguists, anthropologists, and community members to document an endangered language that almost disappeared in the 1960s when the remaining speakers, who numbered fewer than 60, left their homeland and migrated to join larger communities that speak related languages. Fewer than 20 of these original speakers remain, and all of their descendants speak at least two other languages. This project documents the speech of the elders to provide a baseline of the oldest surviving forms of the language and culture, and documents the speech of younger generations to discover changes in the sound structures and grammar of the language caused by the recent multilingualism. To do this, the project records audio and video of a range of speakers using their language. Speakers transcribe a subset of these recordings and translate them to create multilingual subtitles. The most important recordings are also translated to English to facilitate analysis of the sounds and grammar, with special attention to the differences between younger and older speakers. The project also crowdsources a digital dictionary with words translated into English and other languages used by speakers, with linked recordings and photos, all accessible by cell phone or computer. In addition to the scientific findings, the project has the broader impact of training speakers to use computers to work with their language, so they can produce their own books and other educational materials to use in local bilingual schools. The language has been the subject of almost no prior linguistic work, so every scientific product of this project is a new contribution to our understanding of the diversity of human language. This project generates three main products. The first is a crowdsourced digital quadrilingual dictionary, created in the Living Dictionaries progressive web app. During two dictionary workshops, teams of speakers use cell phones to expand and generate new entries for an existing 1400-item wordlist imported by the PI. Local researchers collaborate to complete the dictionary entries, adding parts of speech and English translations. The second product is an archived corpus of translated audio and video recordings, some with time-aligned transcriptions and translations, and some with grammatical annotation and translation into an additional language. This corpus provides an empirical basis for future reference and pedagogical grammars of the language. The third product is a set of scholarly articles for an academic audience covering specific grammatical topics such as syllable structure, lexical stress, sociolinguistic variation, and the creative use of ideophones in storytelling. 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.