Doctoral Dissertation Research: Plant knowledge and its relation to dialect distribution in Greenland

该奖项支持在民族植物学和民族语言学方面的论文研究，以探索格陵兰语已知方言之间的交叉辩证异同。学生研究员CoPI将研究冰岛人对植物的了解和使用，以及这些知识能告诉我们这个国家的语言变化。这位研究人员认为，由于北极地区的植物分布范围是绕极地的，这表明北极地区的人们很可能有类似的用途，而且由于阿拉斯加、加拿大和格陵兰岛的因纽特人有共同的祖先和语言，她应该能够对因纽特人对植物使用的了解和语言变化之间的关系做出一些推断。格陵兰岛是16种因纽特语方言中的3种的所在地，这使它成为记录植物名称和用途的理想地点，以保存这些知识，并确定不同方言之间的用法如何变化，作为所有因纽特方言知识的代理。此外，这些数据将用于检验语言学家Michael Fortescue（1986）提出的解释模型，该模型表明，格陵兰岛的方言分布是相对较近的移民首先迁移到岛上，随后沿着海岸迁移的结果。

This award supports dissertation research in ethno-botany and ethno-linguistics to explore the cross-dialectical similarities and differences among the known dialects of the Greenlandic language. The CoPI, student researcher, will be examining plant knowledge and usage by Greelandic people and what this knowledge can tell us about linguistic change in the country. The researcher argues that because plants in the Arctic are circumpolar in range, suggesting a high likelihood of similar uses among arctic peoples, and because the Inuit of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland share ancestry and language, she should be able to make some inferences about the relationship between Inuit knowledge of plant usage and linguistic change. Greenland is home to three of the 16 Inuit language dialects making it an ideal location for documenting plant names and uses to preserve this knowledge and to determine how usage varies across dialects as a proxy for knowledge across all Inuit dialects. Additionally, these data will be used to test an explanatory model put forth by linguist Michael Fortescue (1986) that suggests dialect distribution in Greenland is the result of relatively recent migrations first to the island and subsequent migrations along the coast.