Collaborative documentation of an endangered language

濒危语言的协作记录

• 批准号: 2319628
• 负责人: Spike Gildea
• 金额: $ 41.84万
• 依托单位: University of Oregon Eugene
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-01-01 至 2026-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2319628&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; documentation; endangered; language

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.

该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，该语言在20世纪60年代几乎消失，当时剩下的发言者人数不到60人，离开家园并迁移到讲相关语言的更大社区。这些最初的使用者中只有不到20人幸存下来，他们的后代都至少会说两种其他语言。该项目记录了老年人的讲话，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讲话，以发现最近的多种语言所造成的语言语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使用他们的语言的发言者的音频和视频。发言者转录这些录音的子集，并将其翻译为多语言字幕。最重要的录音也被翻译成英语，以方便语音和语法分析，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，并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。除了科学发现外，该项目还具有更广泛的影响，即培训演讲者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。这种语言几乎是以前语言学工作的主题，所以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。该项目产生三个主要产品。第一个是一个众包的数字四种语言的字典，创建在生活字典渐进的网络应用程序。在两个字典研讨会，发言者团队使用手机扩展和生成新的条目，现有的1400项词表进口的PI。当地研究人员合作完成词典条目，添加词性和英语翻译。第二个产品是翻译的音频和视频记录的存档语料库，其中一些具有时间对齐的翻译和翻译，另一些具有语法注释和翻译成其他语言。该语料库为今后的参考和教学语法提供了经验基础。第三个产品是一套学术文章，涵盖特定的语法主题，如音节结构，词汇重音，社会语言学的变化，以及在讲故事中创造性地使用表意文字。该奖项是国家科学基金会和国家人文基金会为NSF动态语言基础设施- NEH记录濒危语言计划建立的资助伙伴关系的一部分。该奖项反映了NSF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。