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

与标准语言意识形态相关的社会和语言因素被发现影响着知名语言中语言变量的模式。然而，在土著语言社区，由于社会因素(特别是与教育有关的意识形态)可能有很大的不同，人们还不太清楚相同的因素是否以相同的方式预测差异。这个项目调查了哪些因素限制了一种濒危的南美洲土著语言的变异。这些文件将构成博士论文分析的核心材料。更广泛的影响包括公开存放录音、转录和元数据，以及社区在数据收集和语言分析方面的培训。因此，这项工作的结果通过增强社区驱动的文档和促进创建准确的教学材料直接鼓励语言保持。纽约大学博士生Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez将在秘鲁使用昌卡语进行社会语言学访谈并进行分析。研究Chanka有助于深入了解社会语言学理论如何应用于土著语言很少适用于教育或正规领域的情况，以及说话者对大多数语言(西班牙语)的流利程度存在差异。虽然昌卡语濒临灭绝，但对许多说话者来说，昌卡语仍然是一个至关重要的代码，因此可以记录这种语言在实际使用中的情况。该项目将开发一个转录语料库，其中包括对四个社区的说话者进行的约小时的社会语言学采访，这些语料库被选为西班牙语流利度、粗俗程度和教育程度差异的代表。传统的变分定性方法，通常涉及阅读任务，被改编为视听活动，以确定不识字的人如何评价不同的说话方式。定量分析的重点是语音变量的使用率，该变量是有意识纠正的对象(uvular音素)，以及低于说话人意识水平的形态句法变量(词序和相关限定词以及格标记)。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.