Enriching knowledge of linguistic typology and language classification through linguistic and cultural documentation and analysis of an unknown language complex.

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Languages spoken by small populations are threatened by globalization and socioeconomic change, yet they contain undocumented linguistic and cultural knowledge that leads to a deeper understanding of language use and language structure. This project focuses on linguistic and anthropological analysis of closely related languages that have not yet received systematic attention. The research will advance scientific knowledge of linguistic properties of these under-described languages, and provide new insight into what appear to be highly unusual tone systems and word order properties. The project will further shed light on the understanding of how many languages there are in this language complex and their relationships to each other based on linguistic criteria such as mutual intelligibility and structural intelligibility, and of contact dynamics with neighboring languages. The research will produce a theoretically informed grammar as well as a dictionary, texts, and videos with a focus on practical activities, flora and fauna vocabulary and related ethnobiological information, and reminiscences about now locally extinct megafauna, representing scientific knowledge that that is disappearing with the societal changes that are rapidly occurring.The linguistic component of this project will lead to a theoretically informed corpus-based analysis of these related languages. Products will include audio/video recordings of various genres, reference grammars drawing from the collected corpora as well as elicitation, and dictionaries. The theoretical analyses that will inform important questions in typological theory, in particular in the domains of tone and word order. The collected data will illuminate both the present-day ethno-linguistic landscape of the region and address unsolved issues in language classification. The products of this project will be of value to linguists as well as other sciences.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.