CAREER: Documenting and Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Holocaust Survivors

职业：记录和分析大屠杀幸存者言语中的社会语言变异

• 批准号: 2142797
• 负责人: Isaac Bleaman
• 金额: $ 47.01万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-08-01 至 2027-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2142797&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Documenting; Analyzing; Sociolinguistic; Variation

Genocide often leads to linguicide, or the extreme endangerment of the languages spoken by the communities targeted for destruction. Historical testimony interviews with survivors are a critical source of data for those who wish to describe, analyze, or revitalize these minority languages. To what extent can such materials also be used to reconstruct the social meaning of variable language features or even the direction of language change in the pre-genocide period?This project analyzes sociolinguistic variation and language change in video-recorded testimonies by Holocaust survivors. A genocide of unprecedented scale, the Holocaust had a particularly devastating effect on minority languages. Although the testimonies were not collected specifically for linguistic research purposes, they provide the raw data necessary for innovative projects in phonetic and grammatical analysis. The goal of these projects is to assess the decline of stereotyped dialect features in pre-genocide communities, as well as the actuation of grammatical change after speaker displacement. The grant will fund the development of a new digital archive which will contain testimony transcripts, media files, and metadata. These materials will be made available to researchers, language instructors and students, and members of the public in accessible online formats. In addition to these research outputs, the project includes research and professional training for a postdoctoral scholar in linguistics; the development of modules for undergraduate and graduate sociolinguistics courses on the use of oral histories as language data; and the development of supplementary curricula for intensive language programs, which will familiarize students with the voices of native speakers of endangered varieties.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.

种族灭绝往往会导致语言灭绝，或者导致目标群体所使用的语言受到极度威胁。对于那些希望描述、分析或振兴这些少数民族语言的人来说，对幸存者的历史证词访谈是重要的数据来源。这些材料在多大程度上也可以用来重建种族灭绝前时期可变语言特征的社会意义甚至语言变化的方向？该项目分析了大屠杀幸存者视频记录证词中的社会语言变化和语言变化。大屠杀是一场规模空前的种族灭绝，对少数民族语言造成了特别严重的破坏性影响。尽管这些证词不是专门为语言研究目的而收集的，但它们提供了语音和语法分析创新项目所需的原始数据。这些项目的目标是评估种族灭绝前社区中刻板方言特征的衰落，以及说话者流离失所后语法变化的驱动。这笔赠款将资助开发一个新的数字档案，其中包含证词笔录、媒体文件和元数据。这些材料将以可访问的在线格式提供给研究人员、语言教师和学生以及公众。除了这些研究成果外，该项目还包括对语言学博士后学者的研究和专业培训；为本科生和研究生社会语言学课程开发关于使用口述历史作为语言数据的模块；以及开发强化语言课程的补充课程，这将使学生熟悉濒危物种的母语人士的声音。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，认为值得支持。