Linguistic Anthropological Description and Analysis of Ban Khor Sign Language

这项研究项目由Pi Angela Nonaka指导，是欧洲科学基金会EUROCORES计划(EuroBABEL)下一个更大的国际合作的美国部分。完整的EuroBABEL项目将在村庄社区研究濒危手语，并由来自美国、英国、德国、荷兰和以色列等五个国家的研究人员合作。美国项目承担了班霍尔手语(BKSL)的语言人类学文档、描述和比较分析，BKSL是一种仅在泰国班霍尔村使用的孤立语言。BKSL是一种“土著”或“乡村”手语，是一种在聋人众多的小社区自发发展起来的语言变体；劳动密集型经济；聋人和聋人之间在社区内的教育和职业差异较低；对手语和聋人的态度相对积极。这种不同寻常的语言生态目前将土著/村庄手语与其他类型的手语区分开来，例如“民族”或“原创”变体。人们对土著/村庄手语的特点了解甚少。然而，初步分析表明，BKSL和其他语言孤立一样，保留了不同寻常的语言特征，对这种语言变体的研究可以丰富对语言类型、历史语言学、普遍语法等方面的理解。令人遗憾的是，BKSL和其他土著/村庄手语正濒临灭绝。它们往往表现出压缩的生命周期，这给语言记录和描述以及语言保存和复兴带来了紧迫性和挑战。拟议的BKSL研究是收集和评估来自世界各地土著/村庄手语的语言人类学数据的合作努力的一部分。更具体地说，利用听力和聋人语言学家和人类学家的综合专业知识，这个开创性的项目创建了标准化的研究方案，并采用系统的数据收集来详细描述一种记录不足的濒危手语种类。通过分享他们的发现，研究伙伴将产生一个强大的新数据语料库，这将允许对土著/村庄手语进行前所未有的跨语言和跨文化研究，这是发展正式手语类型学的关键一步。与赞助欧洲巴别塔倡议的目标一致，这一国际伙伴关系将开发“基于濒危语言的更好的分析”。

This research project, directed by PI Angela Nonaka, is the US portion of a larger international collaboration that was conceived under the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES Programme, EuroBABEL. The full EuroBABEL project will study endangered sign languages in village communities, and involves a collaboration of researchers from five countries, including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel. The U.S. project undertakes the linguistic anthropological documentation, description, and comparative analysis of Ban Khor Sign Language (BKSL), a language isolate used only in the village of Ban Khor, Thailand. BKSL is an 'indigenous' or 'village' sign language -- a language variety that spontaneously develops in small communities with large numbers of deaf people; labor-intensive economies; low intra-community educational and occupational differentiation between deaf and hearing people; and relatively positive attitudes toward sign language and deafness. This unusual language ecology currently distinguishes indigenous/village sign languages from other types of sign languages, e.g., 'national' or 'original' varieties.Little is known about the characteristic linguistic features of indigenous/village sign languages. Yet preliminary analysis indicates that BKSL, like other language isolates, preserves unusual linguistic features, and there is growing consensus that study of this language variety can enrich understanding of language typologies, historical linguistics, universal grammar, etc. Regrettably, BKSL and other indigenous/village sign languages are endangered. They often exhibit compressed life cycles that lend urgency to and pose challenges for language documentation and description as well as for language preservation and revitalization.The proposed study of BKSL is part of a collaborative endeavor to gather and evaluate linguistic anthropological data from indigenous/village sign languages around the world. More specifically, drawing on the combined expertise of hearing and Deaf linguists and anthropologists, this pioneering project creates standardized research protocols and employs systematic data collection to pursue detailed description of an under-documented and endangered sign language variety. By sharing their findings, the research partners will generate a robust, new data corpus that will allow for unprecedented cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study of indigenous/village sign languages, a critical step toward development of a formal typology of sign languages. Consistent with the goals of the sponsoring EuroBabel initiative, this international partnership will develop "better analyses based on endangered languages."