Investigating language use in a multilingual community

对使用多种语言的人在日常生活中使用不同语言的方式的研究，已经导致了关于语言的认知、社会和文化方面的重要科学发现。在全球化的压力下，越来越普遍的一种多语现象发生在小型、紧密联系的社区中，其中一种语言正在受到威胁。对这些情况进行科学调查的重要性是双重的。首先，当使用多种语言的人从一种语言转向另一种语言时，人们对其中的过程知之甚少。其次，这种包含重要知识的濒危语言，往往是最少被记录和研究的。这种情况的一个重要例子是在苏门答腊岛西南部的鼻音语言社区中发现的，这个地区充满了语言多样性和异常复杂的多语言情况。这个多语言社区的惊人之处在于，直到2007年，语言学家才知道濒临灭绝的鼻音语言，迄今为止，它还没有成为任何重要研究的主题。然而，初步的田野调查显示，鼻音具有独特的语言特性，例如独特的词缀，可以表示与动作的“完整性”相关的不同含义。该项目是夏威夷大学马诺阿分校（UHM）、印度尼西亚Atma Jaya天主教大学和鼻社区之间的国际合作项目。它将为印度尼西亚的教师和社区成员以及美国和印度尼西亚的学生提供重要的语言学培训。它还将促进美国和印尼之间的双边关系。更广泛的影响还包括UHM博士生的专业发展和演讲事件录音及其转录的公共存储库，可供来自美国和印度尼西亚的学者和鼻腔社区成员访问。该项目将记录鼻音社区的语言实践，这代表了印度尼西亚明古鲁省一个特别复杂的社会语言学状况。这个社区使用多种语言，鼻语（nsy）是一种濒危的马来-波利尼西亚语，现有文献很少，与南马来语（SBM; pse）和Kaur （vkk）在日常交流中使用。这个项目的主要目的是记录鼻音的多语言复杂性。因此，该项目将在其多语言背景下制作大量的鼻音视听文件，并附有全面的语法描述。这些材料为研究紧密联系的社区中的多语使用、印度尼西亚西部的历史以及鼻音中独特词缀的性质提供了重要的数据。此外，随着历史语言学家和考古学家将印尼西部的历史拼凑在一起，来自鼻音的额外数据有可能从根本上改变这种情况。具体活动包括：(i)收集大量鼻音语言实践的视听语料库，（ii）编写多语言词典，（iii）指导一名将撰写鼻音论文的博士生，以及（iv）起草鼻音参考语法和Kaur草图语法。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。

Research into the ways in which multilingual people use different languages in the course of their everyday lives has led to important scientific discoveries about the cognitive, social, and cultural aspects of language. One type of multilingualism that is increasingly prevalent under pressures from globalization occurs in small, tight-knit communities wherein one of the languages being spoken is endangered. The importance of scientific investigations of these situations is twofold. First, little is known about the processes at play when multilingual people shift away from one of the languages. Second, the endangered language, which encapsulates important knowledge, often has been the least documented and researched. One important example of this situation is found in the Nasal speech community in southwest Sumatra, a region full of linguistic diversity and exceptionally complex multilingual situations. What is striking about this multilingual community is that the endangered language, Nasal, was not known by linguists until 2007, and to date it has not been the subject of any significant research. Yet, preliminary fieldwork reveals Nasal has unique linguistic properties, such as unique verbal affixes that present disparate meanings related to the "completeness" of an action. This project is an international collaboration between the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM), Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, and Nasal community. It will provide important training in linguistics to faculty and community members in Indonesia, and students in the US and Indonesia. It will also foster binational relationships between the US and Indonesia. The broader impacts also include the professional development of a UHM doctoral student and a public repository of recordings of speech events and their transcriptions that can be accessed by scholars from the US and Indonesia and Nasal community members. This project will document the linguistic practices of the Nasal speech community, which represents an especially complex sociolinguistic situation in Bengkulu province, Indonesia. This community is multilingual where Nasal (nsy), an endangered Malayo-Polynesian isolate with little existing documentation, is used alongside South Barisan Malay (SBM; pse) and Kaur (vkk) in everyday interactions. The primary aim of this project is to document Nasal in all of its multilingual complexity. Thus, this project will produce extensive audiovisual documentation of Nasal in its multilingual context accompanied by a comprehensive grammatical description. These materials provide crucial data into the study of multilingualism in tight-knit communities, the history of western Indonesia, and the nature of unique verbal affixes in Nasal. Furthermore, as historical linguists and archeologists piece together the history of western Indonesia, additional data from Nasal has the potential to radically alter this picture. Specific activities include: (i) assemble a large audiovisual corpus of the linguistic practices of the Nasal speech community, (ii) compile a multilingual lexicon, (iii) mentor a doctoral student who will write a dissertation on Nasal, and (iv) draft a Nasal reference grammar and Kaur sketch grammar.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.