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来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名讲这种语言的人离开了自己的家园，移民到说相关语言的更大的社区。这些最初的说话者现在只剩下不到20人，他们的后代都至少会说两种其他语言。该项目记录长辈的讲话，以提供现存最古老的语言和文化形式的基线，并记录年轻一代的讲话，以发现由于最近的多种语言使用而造成的语言的声音结构和语法的变化。为了做到这一点，该项目用他们的语言录制了一系列演讲者的音频和视频。演讲者转录这些录音的一个子集，并翻译它们以创建多语言字幕。最重要的录音也被翻译成英语，以便于分析声音和语法，并特别注意年轻和年长说话者之间的差异。该项目还众包了一部数字词典，将单词翻译成英语和说话者使用的其他语言，并附上链接的录音和照片，所有这些都可以通过手机或电脑访问。除了科学发现，该项目还有更广泛的影响，那就是培训说话者使用计算机使用他们的语言，这样他们就可以制作自己的书籍和其他教育材料，供当地的双语学校使用。语言以前几乎没有研究过，所以这个项目的每一项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。第一个是众包数字四语词典，是在生活词典进步网络应用程序中创建的。在两个词典研讨会期间，演讲者团队使用手机为PI输入的现有1400个项目的词表扩展和生成新的词条。当地研究人员合作完成了词典条目，添加了词性和英语翻译。第二个产品是一个翻译的音频和视频记录的存档语料库，其中一些带有与时间一致的转录和翻译，另一些带有语法注释和翻译成另一种语言。该语料库为今后的语言参考和教学语法提供了经验基础。第三个产品是一套面向学术受众的学术文章，涵盖特定的语法主题，如音节结构、词汇重音、社会语言变异，以及在讲故事时创造性地使用表意文字。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 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.