Documenting Language, Ecology and the Aquatic Environment in Kala, an endangered Oceanic language

调查特定地区的生物多样性对于了解其物种和生态系统，以及物种如何相互作用以及与生态系统的相互作用至关重要。当地土著居民的传统生态知识可以加强这种调查。土著语言是知识体系的编码，因此，对该语言的记录在了解该地区的植物、动物和其他生物方面起着关键作用。该项目将同时记录濒危语言社区的语言和传统生态知识。该社区的生活方式近乎自给自足，其特点是适应沿海环境，对河流有着深厚的历史、经济和文化依恋。通过语言文献调查水生环境将增加三个领域的科学知识：语言本身、该地区的水生生态系统以及语言与生物多样性的关系。濒危语言失去动植物分类等领域知识的时间远早于基本词汇和语言结构。更广泛的影响包括在线百科全书，博物馆展览以及研究生的国际研究和培训机会。美国国家科学基金会国际科学与工程办公室为与该项目相关的国际活动提供支持。贝尼斯·p·毕晓普博物馆的肯尼斯·朗格内克领导了一项与夏威夷大学和英属哥伦比亚大学的语言学家和人类学家的国际合作，共同记录卡拉语。卡拉语是南岛语族大洋洲分支的一种濒危语言，生活在巴布亚新几内亚六个沿海村庄的约2000人使用这种语言。巴布亚新几内亚的国土面积与美国加州差不多，拥有850多种语言，其中许多语言记录不足，只有少数人在巨大的发展压力下使用。巴布亚新几内亚独特的生物多样性也受到威胁。通过记录卡拉知识专家在河岸或其他水生栖息地附近进行的口头叙述，该团队将记录特定部落与河流的历史关系，地名起源，物种描述，资源利用实践描述以及与这些环境相关的信仰描述。该项目将扩展现有的卡拉-托克语-英语词典，开发一个包含卡拉语和英语条目的在线环境百科全书，以及语言语法草图。数字化数据将被夏威夷大学数字语言档案馆Kaipuleohone存档，并在毕晓普博物馆举办互动展览，与公众分享项目成果。该项目将为其他依赖语言相关材料的学科（人类学、生物学、历史学、地理学）提供有学术价值的数据，同时增加我们对卡拉语的科学知识。

Investigating the biological diversity of a specific region is essential to understand its species and ecosystems, and how species interact with each other and with their ecosystems. The traditional ecological knowledge of the people indigenous to that locale can enhance such investigations. Indigenous languages encode knowledge systems, so documentation of the language plays a key role in understanding of the region's plants, animals and other organisms. This project will simultaneously document both the language and the traditional ecological knowledge of an endangered language community. The community, which lives a near-subsistence lifestyle, is characterized by their adaptation to the coastal environment and their deep historical, economic and cultural attachment to rivers. Investigating the aquatic environment through language documentation will increase scientific knowledge in three areas: the language itself, the region's aquatic ecosystems, and the relationship of language to biological diversity. This project is urgent because endangered languages lose knowledge of domains like plant and animal classification much earlier than basic vocabulary and language structure. Broader impacts include an online encyclopedia, a museum exhibit and international research and training opportunities for a graduate student. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing support for international activities associated with this project.Kenneth Longenecker of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum leads an international collaboration with linguists and anthropologists at the University of Hawai'i and the University of British Columbia, teaming up to document the Kala language, a threatened language from the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family, spoken by about 2000 people living in six coastal villages in Papua New Guinea. A country roughly the size of California, Papua New Guinea is home to more than 850 languages, many of which are under-documented and spoken by small populations under intense development pressures. The exceptional biological diversity of Papua New Guinea is also under threat. By thematically documenting oral narratives conducted with Kala knowledge experts along river banks or near other aquatic habitats, the team will document accounts of historic relationships of specific clans to rivers, place name origins, species descriptions, descriptions of resource-use practices, and descriptions of beliefs associated with these environments. The project will result in expansions to an existing Kala-Tok Pisin-English dictionary, the development of an online environmental encyclopedia with entries in Kala and English, and a sketch grammar of the language. Digitized data will be archived by Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i Digital Language Archive, and an interactive exhibit at Bishop Museum will share project results with the public. The project will generate data of scholarly interest to other disciplines that depend on language-related material (anthropology, biology, history, geography), while increasing our scientific knowledge of Kala.