Collaborative documentation of an endangered language

这个项目创建了一个由语言学家、人类学家和社区成员组成的团队，以记录一种濒临灭绝的语言，这种语言在20世纪60年代几乎消失了，当时剩下的不到60人的使用者离开了他们的家园，迁移到使用相关语言的更大的社区。原来说这种语言的人现在只剩下不到20人，他们的后代都至少说另外两种语言。该项目记录了老年人的语言，为最古老的语言和文化形式提供了一个基线，并记录了年轻一代的语言，以发现由于最近的多语言化而导致的语言声音结构和语法的变化。为了做到这一点，该项目记录了一系列说话者使用他们语言的音频和视频。讲话者转录这些录音的一个子集，并将其翻译成多语言字幕。最重要的录音也被翻译成英语，以方便对声音和语法的分析，特别注意年轻人和老年人之间的差异。该项目还众包了一本数字词典，里面有翻译成英语和其他语言的单词，还有链接的录音和照片，所有这些都可以通过手机或电脑访问。除了科学发现之外，该项目还具有更广泛的影响，即培训说英语的人使用计算机处理他们的语言，这样他们就可以制作自己的书籍和其他教育材料，供当地双语学校使用。在此之前，几乎没有语言学研究以语言为主题，因此，这个项目的每一个科学成果都是对我们理解人类语言多样性的新贡献。这个项目产生了三个主要产品。第一个是众包的数字四语词典，由进步的网络应用程序Living dictionary创建。在两次词典研讨会期间，演讲者团队使用手机为PI导入的现有1400个单词列表扩展和生成新条目。当地研究人员合作完成词典条目，增加词性和英语翻译。第二个产品是翻译的音频和视频记录的存档语料库，其中一些具有按时间排列的转录和翻译，一些具有语法注释并翻译成其他语言。该语料库为今后的语言参考和教学语法提供了经验基础。第三个产品是一组学术文章，面向学术读者，涵盖特定的语法主题，如音节结构、词汇重音、社会语言学变异以及在讲故事中创造性地使用表意音。该奖项是美国国家科学基金会和美国国家人文基金会为美国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助伙伴关系的一部分。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。

This project creates a team of linguists, anthropologists, and community members to document an endangered language that almost disappeared in the 1960s when the remaining speakers, who numbered fewer than 60, left their homeland and migrated to join larger communities that speak related languages. Fewer than 20 of these original speakers remain, and all of their descendants speak at least two other languages. This project documents the speech of the elders to provide a baseline of the oldest surviving forms of the language and culture, and documents the speech of younger generations to discover changes in the sound structures and grammar of the language caused by the recent multilingualism. To do this, the project records audio and video of a range of speakers using their language. Speakers transcribe a subset of these recordings and translate them to create multilingual subtitles. The most important recordings are also translated to English to facilitate analysis of the sounds and grammar, with special attention to the differences between younger and older speakers. The project also crowdsources a digital dictionary with words translated into English and other languages used by speakers, with linked recordings and photos, all accessible by cell phone or computer. In addition to the scientific findings, the project has the broader impact of training speakers to use computers to work with their language, so they can produce their own books and other educational materials to use in local bilingual schools. The language has been the subject of almost no prior linguistic work, so every scientific product of this project is a new contribution to our understanding of the diversity of human language. This project generates three main products. The first is a crowdsourced digital quadrilingual dictionary, created in the Living Dictionaries progressive web app. During two dictionary workshops, teams of speakers use cell phones to expand and generate new entries for an existing 1400-item wordlist imported by the PI. Local researchers collaborate to complete the dictionary entries, adding parts of speech and English translations. The second product is an archived corpus of translated audio and video recordings, some with time-aligned transcriptions and translations, and some with grammatical annotation and translation into an additional language. This corpus provides an empirical basis for future reference and pedagogical grammars of the language. The third product is a set of scholarly articles for an academic audience covering specific grammatical topics such as syllable structure, lexical stress, sociolinguistic variation, and the creative use of ideophones in storytelling. 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.