COLLBORATIVE RESEARCH: CREATING AN AUDIO-VISUAL CORPUS OF SCOTTISH GAIDHLIG TO PRESERVE AND INVESTIGATE LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

苏格兰盖尔语是一种凯尔特语，与爱尔兰语和威尔士语关系密切，与英语关系较远，曾经在苏格兰各地被大多数人使用。然而，今天盖尔语仍然是一种社区语言，只在苏格兰西部最偏远的地区。盖尔语使用者约占苏格兰人口的1%；2011年的人口普查发现，以英语为母语的人只有57375人，而一个世纪前有25万人。这种急剧的衰落使这种语言的继续生存变得不确定。苏格兰盖尔语引起了极大的兴趣，因为它具有许多罕见的语言特征，包括词头辅音突变，即一个词的词头辅音可以根据该词在从句中的功能而改变。苏格兰盖尔语也有前送气辅音和动词开头的句子结构。此外，该语言还提供了一些突出的例子，说明当地地理和气候特有的知识系统（土地管理、捕鱼技术）如何嵌入该语言中。如果苏格兰盖尔语灭绝，全球社会——不仅仅是苏格兰——将失去一种不可替代的文化和科学资源。通过这个为期两年的项目，内华达大学里诺分校的伊恩·克莱顿教授与亚利桑那大学的安德鲁·卡尼和迈克·哈蒙德教授将创建一个语料库，对30名母语为盖尔语的人进行语言采访。他们将由获得美国语言学会2015年杰出社区语言学奖的母语人士穆里尔·费舍尔（Muriel Fisher）协助。该收藏将包含超过20小时的高质量视听材料，经过转录和翻译，并将包括来自不同年龄，地理来源和专业背景的演讲者的演讲样本。这本书将提供一个宝贵的工具，帮助语言学家扩展他们对这种语言罕见特征的科学研究。此外，访谈将重点关注传统职业、民间传说和口述历史——随着盖尔语的衰落，这些知识和术语面临的风险最大。完成后，语料库将通过马克斯普朗克研究所的语言档案馆和亚利桑那大学的开放资源库向公众开放。

Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language closely related to Irish and Welsh and more distantly to English, was once spoken across Scotland by most of the country's population. Today, however, Gaelic remains a community language only in the most remote regions of western Scotland. Gaelic speakers comprise about 1% of the Scottish population; the 2011 census found only 57,375 native speakers, compared to 250,000 a century earlier. This sharp decline makes the language's continued survival uncertain. Scottish Gaelic is of immense interest because it possesses many rare linguistic features, including initial consonant mutation where a word-initial consonant can be changed depending on the function of that word in a clause. Scottish Gaelic also exhibits pre-aspirated consonants, and verb-initial sentence structure. In addition, the language offers remarkable examples of how knowledge systems particular to local geography and climate (land management, fishing techniques) are imbedded in the language. Should Scottish Gaelic become extinct, the global community -- not just Scotland -- will lose an irreplaceable cultural and scientific resource. Through this two-year project, Professors Ian Clayton from the University of Nevada, Reno along with Andrew Carnie and Mike Hammond from the University of Arizona will create a corpus of linguistic interviews with 30 native Gaelic speakers. They will be assisted by native speaker Muriel Fisher, the recipient of the Linguistic Society of America's 2015 Excellence in Community Linguistics Award. The collection will contain more than twenty hours of high-quality audio-visual material, transcribed and translated and will include speech samples from speakers over range of ages, geographic origins, and professional backgrounds.The collection will offer an invaluable tool to help linguists expand their scientific study of this language's rare features. In addition, the interviews will focus on traditional occupations, folklore, and oral history-- the kinds of knowledge and terminology most at risk as Gaelic declines. When complete, the corpus will be publically available through the Max Planck Institute's Language Archive, and the University of Arizona's Open Repository.