Collaborative Research: Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project

根据《国家地理》的《持久的声音：拯救正在消失的语言》，俄克拉荷马州是世界上的语言热点之一：一个语言多样性很高的地方，但语言严重濒危，文献很少。虽然俄克拉荷马州拥有美国最高的本土语言多样性，但所有39种语言都濒临灭绝。2010年，在俄克拉荷马州大学的萨姆·诺布尔俄克拉荷马州自然历史博物馆举行了一次成功的试点“生命的呼吸：不再沉默研讨会”（BOL）。BOL研讨会将来自社区的参与者与语言学家配对，语言学家指导他们进行语言分析和方法学。该课程是一个理想的介绍档案材料的使用和语言调查和文件的性质。讲习班还促进语言学家和社区成员之间的长期互动，促进语言学家和社区成员的语言技能和文献工作的自然发展和进步。这项合作提案有三个主要目标。首先，它寻求计划和进行为期六天，两级（初级和第二年的水平）俄克拉荷马州生命的呼吸在2012年5月。这将加强与三个社区（Osage，Otoe和Natchez）的原始导师-学员伙伴关系，并提供另外七个社区。像这样的伙伴关系导致了语法、词典、教学材料和记录在案的新说话者的产生。第二，OKBOL讲习班将从现有的档案材料中为这十种语言开发语言数据库。语言档案中的数据比最初的收集者能够分析或发表的要多得多。这笔赠款将使休眠文本，语法启发，和单词列表可用和访问遗产社区和研究人员。第三，在语言学和语言更新教学的早期阶段独特地引入数据库，将用于巩固和测试语言振兴工作与创建新的语言文献之间的联系。通过利用语言学作为一门实证科学的优势，并使用最新的数字化工具，该项目有可能改变记录语言的科学，以及语言学家的培训方式。这项资助支持的活动将为以下假设提供一个测试场：语言复兴培训确实会导致研究不足的新语言文件，据说已经消失的语言，以及人文和科学目标都可以在语言复兴项目中得到满足的假设。最后，像这样的美洲原住民语言开垦项目有助于为所有公民提供美国历史文献的重要组成部分。

According to National Geographic's Enduring Voices: Saving Disappearing Languages, Oklahoma is one of the linguistic hotspots in the world: a place with high language diversity but where the languages are severely endangered and have very little documentation. Although Oklahoma has the highest Native language diversity in the US, all of the thirty-nine languages are endangered. A successful pilot Breath of Life: Silent No More Workshop (BOL) was held at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma in 2010. BOL workshops pair participants from communities that no longer have any fluent speakers with a linguist who mentors them in linguistic analysis and methodology. The curriculum is an ideal introduction to the use of archival materials and to the nature of linguistic investigation and documentation. The workshops also foster long-term interaction between linguists and community members, and for the natural development and progression of language skills and documentary work for both the linguists and the community members. This collaborative proposal has three main goals. First, it seeks to plan and conduct a six-day, two-tiered (beginner and second year levels) Oklahoma Breath of Life in May 2012. This will reinforce the original mentor-mentee partnerships with three communities (Osage, Otoe, and Natchez) and provide for seven more. Partnerships like these lead to the production of grammars, dictionaries, teaching materials, and documented new speakers. Secondly, the OKBOL Workshop will develop language databases for these ten languages from existing archived materials. There is so much more data in linguistic archives than the original collectors were ever able to analyze or publish. This grant will make dormant texts, grammatical elicitations, and word lists usable and accessible to heritage communities and researchers. Third, the unique introduction of databasing in early stages of linguistics and language renewal teaching will be used to solidify and test the connection between language revitalization efforts and the creation of new linguistic documentation. By drawing on the strength of linguistics as an empirical science and using the latest digital tools, this project has the potential to transform the science of documenting languages, as well as how linguists are trained.The activities supported by this grant will provide a testing ground for the hypothesis that language revitalization training does result in new language documentation of understudied, supposedly lost languages, as well as the hypothesis that both humanistic and scientific goals can be met in a language revitalization project. Finally, Native American language reclamation projects like this one help to provide an important part of the historical documentation of the United States for all its citizens.