Collaborative documentation of an endangered language

濒危语言的协作记录

• 批准号: 2319628
• 负责人: Spike Gildea
• 金额: $ 41.84万
• 依托单位: University of Oregon Eugene
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-01-01 至 2026-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2319628&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; documentation; endangered; language

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.

该项目创建了一个由语言学家、人类学家和社区成员组成的团队，记录一种濒临灭绝的语言，这种语言在 20 世纪 60 年代几乎消失，当时剩余的使用者人数不足 60 人，离开自己的祖国，迁移到使用较少相关语言的较大社区。这些原始使用者中的 20 多人仍然存在，并且他们的所有后代都至少讲两种其他语言。该项目记录了长辈的讲话，为现存最古老的语言和文化形式提供了基线。年轻一代的演讲，以发现最近的多语言化造成的语言声音结构和语法的变化。为此，该项目记录了一系列演讲者使用他们的语言的音频和视频，并转录了这些录音的子集。最重要的录音也被翻译成英语，以便于分析声音和语法，特别关注年轻和年长说话者之间的差异，该项目还众包了一本数字词典，其中的单词被翻译成英语和英语。使用的其他语言除了科学发现之外，该项目还具有更广泛的影响，即培训演讲者使用计算机来处理他们的语言，以便他们可以制作自己的书籍和其他内容。语言一直是当地双语学校使用的教育材料，因此该项目的每一项科学成果都是对我们理解人类语言多样性的新贡献。第一个是众包数字四语词典，在两个词典研讨会期间，演讲者团队使用手机为 PI 导入的现有 1400 项单词列表进行扩展和生成新条目，并添加部分词典条目。第二个产品是翻译音频和视频记录的存档语料库，其中一些带有时间对齐的转录和翻译，一些带有语法注释和翻译成其他语言。第三个产品是一套面向学术读者的学术文章，涵盖特定的语法主题，例如音节结构、词汇重音、社会语言变异以及讲故事中意音的创造性使用。该奖项是美国国家科学基金会和国家人文基金会之间资助 NSF 动态语言基础设施（NEH 记录濒危语言计划）合作的一部分。该奖项反映了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，NSF 的法定使命被认为值得支持。