CAREER: Documenting and Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Holocaust Survivors

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Genocide often leads to linguicide, or the extreme endangerment of the languages spoken by the communities targeted for destruction. Historical testimony interviews with survivors are a critical source of data for those who wish to describe, analyze, or revitalize these minority languages. To what extent can such materials also be used to reconstruct the social meaning of variable language features or even the direction of language change in the pre-genocide period?This project analyzes sociolinguistic variation and language change in video-recorded testimonies by Holocaust survivors. A genocide of unprecedented scale, the Holocaust had a particularly devastating effect on minority languages. Although the testimonies were not collected specifically for linguistic research purposes, they provide the raw data necessary for innovative projects in phonetic and grammatical analysis. The goal of these projects is to assess the decline of stereotyped dialect features in pre-genocide communities, as well as the actuation of grammatical change after speaker displacement. The grant will fund the development of a new digital archive which will contain testimony transcripts, media files, and metadata. These materials will be made available to researchers, language instructors and students, and members of the public in accessible online formats. In addition to these research outputs, the project includes research and professional training for a postdoctoral scholar in linguistics; the development of modules for undergraduate and graduate sociolinguistics courses on the use of oral histories as language data; and the development of supplementary curricula for intensive language programs, which will familiarize students with the voices of native speakers of endangered varieties.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.