Doctoral Dissertation Research: Spoken Language Variation in Chanka, an Endangered Language

研究发现，与标准语言意识形态相关的社会和语言因素会影响知名语言中语言变量的模式。然而，考虑到社会因素（尤其是与教育相关的意识形态）可能存在很大差异，在土著语言社区中，同样的因素是否会以同样的方式预测变化，我们并不是很清楚。这个项目调查了哪些因素限制了南美洲一种濒危土著语言的变异。该文件将形成在博士论文中分析的核心材料。更广泛的影响包括录音、转录和元数据的公开存放，以及数据收集和语言分析方面的社区培训。因此，这项工作的结果通过授权社区驱动的文档和促进准确教学材料的创建，直接鼓励了语言维护。Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez是纽约大学的博士候选人，她将用秘鲁的克丘亚语（Quechua）的昌卡语（Chanka）进行社会语言学访谈，并对其进行分析。研究Chanka提供了洞察社会语言学理论如何应用于土著语言很少适合教育或正式领域的情况，以及在大多数语言（西班牙语）的流利程度不同的情况下。尽管濒临灭绝，Chanka仍然是许多使用者的重要代码，因此可以记录该语言的实际使用情况。该项目将开发一个大约64小时的社会语言学访谈的转录语料库，这些访谈来自四个社区，被选为西班牙语流利程度、乡村性和教育程度差异的代理。传统的变异定性方法，通常包括阅读任务，被改编为视听活动，以确定不识字的说话者如何评价不同的说话方式。定量分析的重点是有意识纠正的语音变量（小舌音素）和低于说话者意识水平的形态句法变量（词序和相关限定词和大小写标记）的使用率。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。

Social and linguistic factors related to standard language ideologies have been found to affect the patterning of linguistic variables in well-known languages. However, in indigenous speech communities, it is not well understood whether the same factors predict variation in the same way, given that social factors (especially education-related ideologies) can be quite different. This project investigates which factors constrain variation in an endangered indigenous language of South America. The documentation will form the core material to be analyzed in a doctoral dissertation. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings, transcriptions, and metadata, as well as community training in data collection and linguistic analysis. Results from this work thus directly encourage language maintenance by empowering community-driven documentation and facilitating the creation of accurate pedagogical materials.Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez, a doctoral candidate at New York University, will conduct and analyze sociolinguistic interviews in the Chanka variety of Quechua, spoken in Peru. Studying Chanka offers insight into how sociolinguistic theories apply to situations where indigenous languages are rarely appropriate for education or formal domains, and where speakers have varied fluency in the majority language (Spanish). While endangered, Chanka continues to be a vital code for many speakers, thus allowing documentation of the language in actual use. This project will develop a transcribed corpus of approximately 64 hours of sociolinguistic interviews with speakers in four communities, selected as proxies for differences in Spanish fluency, ruralness, and education. Traditional variationist qualitative methods, often involving reading tasks, are adapted as audiovisual activities to determine how non-literate speakers evaluate different ways of speaking. The quantitative analysis focuses on rates of use of both a phonological variable that is the object of conscious correction (the uvular phoneme), and morphosyntactic variables below the level of speaker awareness (word order and related determiners and case marking).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.