Documenting Mayan Language Acquisition

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Children have the astonishing capacity to acquire any human language. This capacity far outstrips the ability of today's fastest supercomputers, and is especially surprising in light of fundamental structural differences that separate the world's languages. The language acquisition phenomenon is a central motivation in linguists' search for language universals, but this search cannot succeed without careful documentation of the variation that presently exists among the world's languages. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world's languages will go extinct in a generation. The documentation of these endangered languages will help preserve a unique product of human intellectual achievement as well as support a deeper understanding of children's amazing linguistic feat. This project will document the acquisition process in three Mayan languages. This is a critical time to document the acquisition of Mayan languages while there are still children acquiring them in traditional settings. Mayan languages differ from European languages on many key linguistic dimensions. Of prime importance is the Mayan system of ergative agreement which marks the subject of transitive verbs differently from the subject of intransitive verbs. The project will establish a linguistic infrastructure for recording and transcribing samples of children's language in three Mayan communities. Students with linguistic training who come from the targeted communities and who speak the language(s) of their community will be responsible for conducting the research. A further goal of the project is to establish a comparative acquisition base for the Mayan languages to facilitate comparison between processes of historical change and language acquisition.