Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Documentation of Wamesa

博士论文研究：瓦梅萨语言文献

• 批准号: 1153795
• 负责人: Claire Bowern
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Yale University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-03-01 至 2015-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1153795&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Language; Documentation

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.

在当今世界上使用的大约7,000种语言中，估计至少有一半将在未来100年内停止使用。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使用时，它们的记录将不会保留下来，它们编码的知识将无可避免地丢失。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8,000人使用。这个项目的目标是记录瓦梅萨，创造一个持久的语言记录。Gasser女士将在印度尼西亚度过七个月的时间，与母语为该语言的人一起工作，并记录故事，对话和引发文本。其结果将是一个参考语法的语言，一个转录语料库的记录文本，和一个小瓦梅萨/英语/印尼语词典。参考语法也将作为博士论文提交。这项工作将是有价值的语言学和瓦梅萨人民。虽然瓦梅萨语的使用者比许多邻近语言都多，但对它的研究却很少。这意味着瓦梅萨语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无法为科学所用。在城市长大的瓦梅萨儿童主要用印度尼西亚语交流，这使瓦梅萨的未来处于危险之中。重要的是开始工作，现在仍然是至关重要的，足以提供一个彻底的语言和它的结构。该项目制作的词典和录音集将对瓦梅萨社区很有价值，因为他们正在努力保护自己的传统语言和文化。最后，该项目将向当地大学生提供语言培训，使他们能够对巴布亚的许多其他濒危语言进行记录、分析和保护。