Documenting Language, Ecology and the Aquatic Environment in Kala, an endangered Oceanic language

调查一个特定区域的生物多样性对于了解该区域的物种和生态系统，以及物种如何相互作用及其与生态系统的相互作用至关重要。当地土著人民的传统生态知识可以加强这种调查。土著语言是知识系统的编码，因此语言的文献在了解该地区的植物、动物和其他生物体方面发挥着关键作用。该项目将同时记录濒危语言社区的语言和传统生态知识。 该社区的生活方式几乎只能维持生计，其特点是适应沿海环境，并在历史、经济和文化上与河流有着深厚的联系。通过语言文献调查水生环境将增加三个领域的科学知识：语言本身，该地区的水生生态系统，以及语言与生物多样性的关系。这个项目是紧迫的，因为濒危语言失去的领域知识，如植物和动物分类比基本词汇和语言结构早得多。更广泛的影响包括在线百科全书，博物馆展览和国际研究和研究生培训机会。美国国家科学基金会国际科学与工程办公室正在为与该项目相关的国际活动提供支持。伯尼采P.毕晓普博物馆的肯尼斯·朗格内克领导了一项国际合作，与夏威夷大学和不列颠哥伦比亚省大学的语言学家和人类学家合作，共同记录卡拉语，这是一种来自南岛语系海洋分支的濒危语言，居住在巴布亚新几内亚六个沿海村庄的大约2000人说这种语言。巴布亚新几内亚是一个大约有加州那么大的国家，拥有850多种语言，其中许多语言没有得到充分的记录，只有少数人在巨大的发展压力下使用。巴布亚新几内亚独特的生物多样性也受到威胁。通过专题记录卡拉知识专家沿着河岸或其他水生栖息地附近进行的口头叙述，该小组将记录特定氏族与河流的历史关系，地名起源，物种描述，资源使用实践的描述，以及与这些环境相关的信仰描述。 该项目将扩大现有的卡拉-托克皮辛语-英语词典，开发一个在线环境百科全书，其中有卡拉语和英语条目，以及该语言的语法草图。数字化数据将由夏威夷大学数字语言档案馆Kaipuleohone存档，主教博物馆的互动展览将与公众分享项目成果。该项目将产生对依赖语言相关材料的其他学科（人类学，生物学，历史，地理学）有学术兴趣的数据，同时增加我们对卡拉的科学知识。

Investigating the biological diversity of a specific region is essential to understand its species and ecosystems, and how species interact with each other and with their ecosystems. The traditional ecological knowledge of the people indigenous to that locale can enhance such investigations. Indigenous languages encode knowledge systems, so documentation of the language plays a key role in understanding of the region's plants, animals and other organisms. This project will simultaneously document both the language and the traditional ecological knowledge of an endangered language community. The community, which lives a near-subsistence lifestyle, is characterized by their adaptation to the coastal environment and their deep historical, economic and cultural attachment to rivers. Investigating the aquatic environment through language documentation will increase scientific knowledge in three areas: the language itself, the region's aquatic ecosystems, and the relationship of language to biological diversity. This project is urgent because endangered languages lose knowledge of domains like plant and animal classification much earlier than basic vocabulary and language structure. Broader impacts include an online encyclopedia, a museum exhibit and international research and training opportunities for a graduate student. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing support for international activities associated with this project.Kenneth Longenecker of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum leads an international collaboration with linguists and anthropologists at the University of Hawai'i and the University of British Columbia, teaming up to document the Kala language, a threatened language from the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family, spoken by about 2000 people living in six coastal villages in Papua New Guinea. A country roughly the size of California, Papua New Guinea is home to more than 850 languages, many of which are under-documented and spoken by small populations under intense development pressures. The exceptional biological diversity of Papua New Guinea is also under threat. By thematically documenting oral narratives conducted with Kala knowledge experts along river banks or near other aquatic habitats, the team will document accounts of historic relationships of specific clans to rivers, place name origins, species descriptions, descriptions of resource-use practices, and descriptions of beliefs associated with these environments. The project will result in expansions to an existing Kala-Tok Pisin-English dictionary, the development of an online environmental encyclopedia with entries in Kala and English, and a sketch grammar of the language. Digitized data will be archived by Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i Digital Language Archive, and an interactive exhibit at Bishop Museum will share project results with the public. The project will generate data of scholarly interest to other disciplines that depend on language-related material (anthropology, biology, history, geography), while increasing our scientific knowledge of Kala.