EAGER: Collaborative Approach to the Documentation of Endangered Languages in Linguistically Diverse Locales

世界上估计有7000种语言，其中一半预计不会存活到下个世纪。这带来的一个挑战是，迫切需要在当地人转向本国语言或其他语言的地方记录语言。另一个挑战是找到足够数量的训练有素的记录员，特别是在有许多地方和区域语言的地方。因此，有许多语言没有被记录下来，它们的生存受到威胁。这对科学研究人类语言的变异范围构成了一个严重的潜在问题。在这个地区，许多受过教育的年轻人对当地和地区语言产生了更大的兴趣，并有可能在记录这些语言方面发挥重要作用，该项目将利用这一地区。它将通过与非专业语言学家或语言文献工作者的当地公民科学家合作，与语言学研究生合作，增加这一文档瓶颈的人力资源方面。对人力资本的投资有风险，这种方法依赖于项目结束后对记录这些濒危语言的持续兴趣。如果这项投资取得成功，它可能会对一个拥有世界10%语言的地区的科学知识产生重大影响。更广泛的影响包括国际研究和研究生培训，增加对濒危地方语言的关注，以及培训参与知识生产的公民科学家。这个计划由特拉华大学的语言学家团队与印尼和日本的语言学家合作，将测试一种新方法，让印尼年轻人参与到语言纪录中来，方法是建立印尼人（母语是这些濒危语言）与希望专攻语言纪录的美国研究生组成的团队。除了国语印尼语，语言学家们才刚刚开始记录印尼语的工作（记录一个带注释的样本并描述语言）。据估计，印尼有719种或更多的语言，印尼东部有大量未被记录的语言。小组中的美国和印度尼西亚成员在语言文档相关技能方面的优势不同，印度尼西亚人的语言技能和对文化背景的理解要强得多，而美国人在语言学和语言文档方面接受了更多的技术培训。通过将美国人和印度尼西亚人组成团队，我们希望这个团队能够结合两个群体的优势，从而在语言文档方面取得比任何一个群体单独取得的成功得多。该项目将连续两年在东印度尼西亚为两组美国/印度尼西亚小组提供实地经验。如果这种方法确实能够有效地提高文档的生产效率和质量，那么它可能会成为语言文档的一种新模式，可以成功地应用于世界其他地区。项目资料将在PARADISEC存档。

There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world, and half of those not expected to survive into the next century. One challenge this presents is the urgent need to document languages in places where local people are shifting to national or other languages. Another challenge is finding sufficient number of trained documenters, especially in places that have many local and regional languages. As a result, there are many languages that have not been documented and whose survival is threatened. This constitutes a serious potential problem for the scientific study of the range of variation found in human language. This project will capitalize on a region where many young, educated people are taking a greater interest in their local and regional languages, and have the potential to play a major role in documenting these languages. It will increase the human resources side of this documentation bottleneck by partnering local citizen scientists who are not professional linguists or documenters of language with graduate linguistics students. Investing in the human capital takes the risk that this approach is depending on continued interest after the project in documenting these endangered languages. If this investment is successful, it could have a major impact on scientific knowledge for an area with 10% of the world's languages. Broader impacts include international research and training for graduate students, increased attention to endangered local languages, and the training of citizen scientists who participate in the production of knowledge. This project, led by a team of linguists from the University of Delaware and partner linguists in Indonesia and Japan will test out a new way to increase the involvement of young Indonesians in the documentation of their languages by creating teams of Indonesians (who are native speakers of these endangered languages) and American graduate students who hope to specialize in language documentation. Aside from the national language, Indonesian, linguists have only just begun the task of documenting Indonesian languages (recording an annotated sample and describing the language). Indonesia is estimated to have 719 or more languages, and east Indonesia is particularly rich with undocumented languages. The American and Indonesian members of the teams differ in terms of their strengths in the skills relevant to language documentation, the Indonesians having much stronger language skills and an understanding of the cultural context, and the Americans having greater technical training in linguistics and language documentation. By combining Americans and Indonesians in teams, it is hoped that the team will combine the strengths of the two groups, and, thus, will be much more successful in language documentation than either group could be individually. The project will provide field experiences in East Indonesia for two groups of American/Indonesian teams in two successive years. If this methodology does in fact seriously increase productivity and quality of documentation, it may constitute a new model for language documentation that can be applied with success to other parts of the world. Project materials will be archived at PARADISEC.