Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Documentation of Wamesa

据估计，当今世界上大约有7000种语言，其中至少有一半将在未来100年内消失。到目前为止，这些语言中有许多是完全没有记录的，这意味着当它们不再被使用时，它们的记录将不复存在，它们编码的知识将不可挽回地丢失。其中一种语言是瓦梅萨语，目前在印度尼西亚的西巴布亚省约有8000人使用。这个项目的目标是记录瓦梅萨语，为该语言创造一个持久的记录。加塞尔将在印尼待上7个月，与以印尼语为母语的人一起工作，记录故事、对话和引子文本。结果将是语言的参考语法，记录文本的转录语料库，以及一个小型瓦萨语/英语/印尼语词典。参考语法也将作为博士论文提交。这项工作将对语言学和瓦梅萨人有价值。虽然瓦美萨语的使用者比邻近的许多语言都多，但对它的研究却很少。这意味着Wamesa并没有为语言学理论提供信息；它可能提供的任何见解目前都是科学无法获得的。在城市长大的瓦梅萨儿童主要用印尼语交流，这使瓦梅萨的未来处于危险之中。重要的是现在就开始工作，而语言社区仍然至关重要，足以提供语言及其结构的全面说明。这个项目制作的词典和录音集对瓦梅萨社区来说是有价值的，因为他们正在努力保护他们的传统语言和文化。最后，这个计画将提供语言训练给当地大学生，让他们可以从事巴布亚许多其他濒危语言的记录、分析和保存工作。

Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, it is estimated that at least half will cease to be spoken within the next 100 years. Many of these languages are so far entirely undocumented, meaning that when they fall out of use no record of them will remain, and the knowledge they encode will be irrevocably lost. One such language is Wamesa, currently spoken by approximately 8,000 people in the province of West Papua, Indonesia. The goal of this project is to document Wamesa, creating a lasting record of the language. Ms. Gasser will spend seven months in Indonesia working with native speakers of the language and recording stories, conversations, and elicited texts. The result will be a reference grammar of the language, a transcribed corpus of recorded texts, and a small Wamesa/English/Indonesian dictionary. The reference grammar will also be submitted as the doctoral dissertation.This work will be of value to linguistics and to the Wamesa people. Though Wamesa has more speakers than many neighboring languages, very little research has been done on it. This means that Wamesa is not informing linguistic theories; any insights it might provide are currently unavailable to science. Wamesa children growing up in cities communicate primarily in Indonesian, putting the future of Wamesa in jeopardy. It is important to begin work now while the speech community is still vital enough to provide a thorough account of the language and its structures. The dictionary and collection of recordings produced by this project will be valuable to the Wamesa community as they work to preserve their traditional language and culture. Finally, this project will provide linguistic training to local college students so that they may undertake the documentation, analysis, and preservation of the many other endangered languages of Papua.