Doctoral Dissertation Research: A corpus-based reference grammar of an endangered language

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

Due to increasing globalization, among other factors, speakers of some marginalized languages are becoming increasingly pressured to switch to more dominant languages. This results in the loss of a language in addition to important parts of the culture and knowledge that have allowed people to steward their homelands. This knowledge helps to understand how humans have traveled, settled, and changed over the course of existence and gives deep insights into ecosystems and their stewardship. Therefore, the retention of cultural and linguistic heritage is an important factor in identity-building, especially in diaspora communities. This doctoral dissertation project consists of community-focused language documentation of such languages and creates a corpus and a reference grammar available to both the local community and researchers in the field. This project additionally benefits society because the data can be used by others to create revitalization and educational language materials. Languages under pressure with growing diaspora communities, especially those spoken in marginalized areas that have relatively small speaker numbers to begin with, are at a high risk of becoming endangered, and, eventually, becoming dormant. Through fieldwork with local community members, this doctoral dissertation project creates a grammatical description of an endangered language based on naturalistic speech data. Field activities include collecting high-quality naturalistic speech data and recording phonology-focused data from a wide range of demographics and language varieties. Recorded oral tradition is translated for linguistic analysis. Grammatical description is tied to a publicly accessible multimedia corpus of natural language data, providing an enduring record of language and culture to the community, researchers, and the public. The project is community-based, with the community informing the areas for documentation. All collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata, and relevant images) that have been granted open access by the community are stored in a publicly available language archive. 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.