Investigating Endangered Language Contact for Awakateko and K'iche', two Mayan languages

当至少两种语言或语言变体相互作用时，就会出现语言接触的情况。语言学家知道，在这些情况下会产生各种各样的结果。例如，有时只有几个词是借来的，或者可能出现了全新的语言，或者说话者使用两种语言，并以系统的、有模式的方式在它们之间切换和混合。关于语言接触情境的现有知识存在很大的差距，当考虑到涉及两种或更多濒危语言的接触情境时，这些差距就更大了。濒临灭绝的语言接触引发了关于语言“活力”的问题，即谁在使用语言，如何使用语言，在哪里使用语言。更未被充分研究的是儿童在这种接触情况下的语言习得。该项目将记录濒危语言接触地区儿童和成人的语言使用情况。更广泛的影响包括为研究生提供国际研究和培训机会，并促进美国和外国学术机构之间新的国际合作。美国国家科学基金会国际科学与工程办公室为与该项目相关的国际活动提供支持。在345,937平方公里的面积上，约有300万人使用30多种玛雅语言，其中许多语言相互接触，导致使用多种语言的人。虽然已经对几种玛雅语言进行了文献项目，但它们在接触中的相互作用尚未得到广泛研究。了解接触诱发变化的原理将使语言科学家能够更好地记录这些语言，并就如何维护这些语言提出建议。该小组将重点研究危地马拉西部韦韦特南戈地区的两种濒危玛雅语言——瓦卡特科语和凯切语。该项目将调查以下主要问题：学习这两种语言中的一种或两种的儿童是如何使用它们的，是什么决定了哪一种语言更占优势？这个地区的成年人日常使用wakateko和K'iche的模式是什么？哪些因素决定了其中一种语言的相对重要性？在马里兰大学语言学家玛丽亚·波林斯基的带领下，这项合作包括两名在美国受训的语言学家佩德罗·马特奥·佩德罗博士和Ajb'ee jim<s:1> nez Sánchez博士，他们都是母语为玛雅语的人，在母语和其他玛雅语言的语言实地考察方面也很有经验。考虑到他们在传统语言、句法理论、玛雅语言、语言接触和儿童语言习得方面的集体专业知识，该团队在开展这项调查方面处于独特的地位。该项目将重点关注一系列语音和形态句法现象：重音；腭音化;数词分类和去及物化手段（即，反被动和代理焦点）。此外，该项目将建立一个由双语和多语讲者编写的自然数据（叙述和对话）的转录和注释语料库，供其他研究人员和一般公众使用。该项目有一个强大的培训组成部分，将吸引两种语言的母语人士，这些训练有素的母语公民科学家将在数据收集中发挥主要作用。

Language contact situations arise when at least two languages or varieties interact. Linguists know that there are a wide variety of outcomes that occur in these situations. For example, sometimes only a few words are borrowed, or perhaps entirely new languages emerge, or speakers use both languages and switch and mix between them in systematic, patterned ways. There are significant gaps in existing knowledge about language contact situations, and those gaps are even larger when considering contact situations involving two or more endangered languages. Endangered language contact raises questions on language 'vitality,' that is, who, how and where the languages are in use. Even more understudied is child language acquisition in such contact situations. This project will document the language usage by children and adults in a region where endangered languages are in contact. Broader impacts include providing graduate students with international research and training opportunities and fostering a new international collaboration between U.S. and foreign academic institutions. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing support for international activities associated with this project.With more than 30 Mayan languages are spoken by about 3 million people in an area of 345,937 square kilometers, many of these languages are in contact, resulting in multilingual speakers. Although documentation projects have been carried out on several Mayan languages, their interaction under contact has not been studied extensively. Understanding the principles of contact-induced change will allow language scientists to better document these languages and to make suggestions concerning their maintenance. The team will focus on Awakateko and K'iche', two endangered Mayan languages from the Huehuetenango region of western Guatemala. This project will investigate the following main questions: How do children acquiring one or both of these languages use them, and what determines which language is more dominant? What are the patterns of everyday use of Awakateko and K'iche' by adult speakers in this area? What factors determine the relative importance of one of the languages? Led by University of Maryland linguist Maria Polinsky, the collaboration includes two U.S.-trained linguists, Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro and Dr. Ajb'ee Jiménez Sánchez, both of whom are native speakers of Mayan languages and are also experienced in linguistic fieldwork on their own and other Mayan languages. The team is uniquely positioned to carry out this investigation, given their collective expertise on heritage languages, syntactic theory, Mayan languages, language contact, and child language acquisition. The project will focus on a set of phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena: stress; palatalization; numeral classifiers and detransitivization means (i.e., antipassive and agent focus). In addition, the project will construct a transcribed, annotated corpus of naturally occurring data (narratives and dialogues) with bilingual and multilingual speakers which will be accessible to other researchers and the general public. The project has a strong training component that will engage native speakers of both languages, and these trained native-speaker citizen scientists will play the primary role in data collection.