Conference on Minority Language Documentation for Community Language Practitioners

语言学家的主要培训中心是美国、欧洲、澳大利亚和拉丁美洲的大学。这给印尼这样的国家带来了挑战，因为印尼培养出的训练有素的语言学家要少得多，但在世界上估计的7000种语言中，至少有700种与印尼接壤。解决记录濒危语言培训瓶颈的一种创新的协作方法是使用相对较短的培训研讨会，将具有不同专业知识的团队聚集在一起。该讲习班将举行为期一周的语言文件会议，会议的额外好处是编写有关这些语言的文件。重点将放在努沙登加拉帖木儿的濒危语言上，因为这些语言的使用者很少或根本没有记录方面的专门知识。东印度尼西亚语言的科学兴趣包括它们与该地区语言历史的相关性，对这些语言的进一步记录和分析将对亚洲和澳大利亚大陆之间的生物地理过渡地带的两个完全不同的语族的研究产生广泛的影响。美国研究生将获得国际实地研究和培训经验，少数民族语言使用者将获得语言文档和存档的最佳实践培训。将会有更多的国际合作机会。项目产品包括支持社区语言工作的材料，并将文件存放在受到高度重视的PARADISEC档案中，将增加有关目标语言的可获得数据。本次会议的重点是培训以英语为母语的文档工作者，因为他们通常更有能力完成文档的任务，从获得适当的许可到安排录音会议，再到抄写和注释文本。来自两个完全不同的语系的语言，南岛语族的中马来-波利尼西亚语族和非南岛语族的帝汶-阿罗-潘塔尔语族，长期以来被认为是新几内亚大陆的跨新几内亚语言，将在研讨会期间被记录下来。两个科都有一些类型学特征，这些特征似乎在整个科中扩散开来，最明显的是在语法占有系统中，无论是在组成顺序上，还是在公开区分可剥夺的和不可剥夺的占有上，这些特征在南岛人家族中都很少见。另一方面，这些语言经常区分包容性和排他性代词，这在南岛语中很常见，但在新几内亚的非南岛语中却很少见。培训濒危语言使用者制作、语言注释和存档高质量数据，将为这些和其他主题的进一步科学调查奠定基础。由此产生的文件将增加对东印度尼西亚语的科学知识，同时也为该地区未来的项目奠定基础，包括两组参与者、研究生和以母语为母语的文件编制者之间可能的合作。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The major centers of training for linguists are universities in the United States, Europe, Australia and Latin America. This creates a challenge for countries like Indonesia, which produce significantly fewer trained linguists, yet at least 700 of the estimated 7,000 languages of the world are spoken with its borders. One innovative, collaborative approach to addressing the training bottleneck in documenting endangered languages is the use of relatively short training workshops that bring together teams with different expertise. This workshop will use conduct a one-week language documentation conference that has the additional benefit of producing documentation on the languages. The focus will be on the endangered languages of Nusa Tenggara Timur, since speakers of these languages have little or no documentary expertise. The scientific interest of East Indonesian languages includes their relevance to the linguistic history of the region and further documentation and analysis of these languages will have broad implications for the study of two entirely different language families in this biogeographical transition zone between the Asian and Australian continents. U.S. graduate students will gain international field research and training experience, and minority language speakers will be trained in best practices in language documentation and archiving. There will be increased international collaboration opportunities. Project products include materials supporting language efforts in the communities and the deposit of documentation in the highly regarded PARADISEC archive will increase accessible data on the targeted languages.This conference focuses on training native speaker documenters, because they are often in a better position to conduct the tasks of documentation, from securing appropriate permissions to arranging recording sessions to transcribing and annotating texts. Languages from two entirely different language families, the Austronesian Central Malayo-Polynesian family, and the non-Austronesian Timor-Alor-Pantar, long assumed to be Trans-New Guinea languages of mainland New Guinea, will be documented during the workshop. Both families share a number of typological features which appear to have diffused across the families, most notably in the system of grammatical possession, both in constituent order and in overtly distinguishing between alienable and inalienable possession, features which are rare in the Austronesian family. On the other hand, the languages often distinguish inclusive vs. exclusive pronouns, a feature common among Austronesian language but rare in the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea. The training of endangered language speakers to produce, linguistically annotate, and archive quality data will lay the groundwork for further scientific investigation of these and other topics. The resulting documentation will increase scientific knowledge of Eastern Indonesian languages, while also laying the groundwork for future projects in this region, including possible collaborations between the two groups of participants, graduate students and native speaker documenters.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.