Collaborative Research: Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project

根据《国家地理》的《持久的声音：拯救消失的语言》，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，但这些语言严重濒临灭绝，而且文献资料很少。尽管俄克拉荷马州拥有美国最高的母语多样性，但所有三十九种语言都濒临灭绝。 2010 年，俄克拉荷马大学 Sam Noble 俄克拉荷马自然历史博物馆成功举办了试点“生命之息：不再沉默”研讨会 (BOL)。BOL 研讨会将来自不再拥有流利语言的社区的参与者与一位语言学家配对，后者在语言分析和方法方面对他们进行指导。该课程是对档案材料的使用以及语言调查和记录的本质的理想介绍。这些研讨会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。该合作提案具有三个主要目标。首先，它力求在 2012 年 5 月计划和开展为期六天的两级（初学者和二年级）俄克拉荷马州生命呼吸活动。这将加强与三个社区（Osage、Otoe 和 Natchez）的最初导师与学员合作关系，并提供另外七个社区的合作伙伴关系。像这样的合作关系导致了语法、词典、教材和记录的新演讲者的产生。其次，OKBOL 研讨会将从现有的存档材料中开发这十种语言的语言数据库。语言档案中的数据比原始收藏者能够分析或发布的数据要多得多。这笔赠款将使遗产社区和研究人员可以使用和访问休眠文本、语法启发和单词列表。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复兴工作与新语言文献创建之间的联系。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。这笔赠款支持的活动将为以下假设提供一个试验场：语言复兴培训确实会为未被充分研究的、据称已经消失的语言带来新的语言记录，以及在语言复兴项目中可以实现人文和科学目标的假设。最后，像这样的美洲原住民语言回收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.