Endangered languages in contact: A multilingual spoken corpus for language documentation and research

这个项目记录和分析了一组在语言多样化的边境地区说的濒危语言变体，这些语言几百年来一直在相互接触中发展起来。它还考察了濒危方言与密切相关的变种接触的具体情况，这些变种在语言濒危研究中被过度忽视。因此，这个项目将为我们提供重要的信息，帮助我们理解语言变异和变化的基本问题，并将做出可推广到其他语言接触情况的理论贡献。对研究不足和濒危的语言进行记录，对于保存文化知识和促进有关人类语言的科学理论非常重要。需要在更广泛的生态语境中研究濒危语言，以便更好地理解语言接触、维持和转换的过程：这包括心理语境(双语或多语种使用者头脑中不同变体的相互作用)和社会学语境(小数化变体之间的具体关系及其与标准语言的互动，以及这些不同变体如何在社会中作为交流媒介)。该项目创建了一个在线可搜索的口语语料库，以便对多语种使用者的语言变异和语码转换做法进行量化分析。它利用现有资源开发一条开放源码管道，用于处理和注释资源不足品种的多语种数据。语料库界面将被构建为一个闪亮的应用程序，它可以改编用于其他语料库，并允许许多其他可能性的数据可视化和统计分析，因为它使用流行的R软件环境。网络界面还将设计成便于非专业人员使用，以便对该区域的语言和文化遗产感兴趣或对语言的维护和振兴感兴趣的当地社区成员能够获取这些数据。这一奖项是国家科学基金会和国家人文基金会为国家科学基金会动态语言基础设施-NEH记录濒危语言项目建立的资金合作伙伴关系的一部分。该奖项反映了国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

This project documents and analyzes a group of endangered language varieties spoken in a linguistically diverse border region, which have developed in contact with one another for hundreds of years. It also examines the specific situation of endangered dialects in contact with closely related varieties, which have been unduly ignored in research on language endangerment. This project will therefore provide us with important information that can help us understand fundamental issues of language variation and change, and will make theoretical contributions that are generalizable to other language-contact situations. Documentation of understudied and endangered languages is important for the preservation of cultural knowledge and for the advancement of scientific theories about human language. Endangered languages need to be studied in their broader ecological context in order to better understand the processes of language contact, maintenance, and shift: this includes the psychological context (the interaction of different varieties in the minds of bi- or multilingual speakers) and the sociological context (the specific relations among minoritized varieties and their interactions with standard languages, and how these different varieties function within society as mediums of communication). The project creates an online searchable spoken corpus that will allow for the quantitative analysis of language variation and code-switching practices by multilingual speakers. It leverages existing resources to develop an open-source pipeline for processing and annotating multilingual data from under-resourced varieties. The corpus interface will be built as a Shiny application, which can be adapted for use with other corpora and which allows many other possibilities for data visualization and statistical analysis, since it uses the popular R software environment. The web interface will also be designed to facilitate use by non-specialists, in order to make these data accessible to members of the local communities who are interested in the linguistic and cultural heritage of the region or in language maintenance and revitalization. This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program.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.