Workshop: Multilingualism, Contact and Documenting Endangered Languages

世界上的许多语言都没有得到充分的研究和描述，在本世纪的过程中，我们正面临着许多语言的消失，这种情况通常被称为语言濒危。语言学家目前感兴趣的是记录、描述和分析这些语言，同时还有人会说这些语言。迄今为止，对濒危语言的记录主要集中在单语文献语料库的创建上，但众所周知，语言濒危主要是由于面对语言接触的转变，而不是由于灾难性的天气、自然灾害或战争。这项奖助金支持一个工作坊，训练语言学家记录语言接触和多语言使用，特别关注濒危语言。讲习班将汇集该领域既有经验又正在使用创新方法的专家，为培训和讨论问题、方法和最佳做法提供一个论坛。更广泛的影响包括更广泛地发展和传播语言文档中的前沿方法，早期职业教师的当前研究报告，以及容纳包括研究生和其他参与者在内的大量受众的能力。更好地了解多语言环境的一个特殊实际应用是语音技术，它对整个社会有直接的好处。使用这些语言的社区也将受益于更好地了解他们在日常生活中如何使用一种以上的语言。研讨会将于2019年在纽约与美国语言学协会（美国语言学家专业协会）的年度会议同时举行，以便广泛的语言学家和学生参与。语言学家需要记录过程中的语言接触，以更好地理解在语言转换过程中发生的语言过程，发生的语言变化的种类，提供对变化的方向性和速度的见解，以及涉及语言转换的语言和语言外因素的作用。改进科学的文献记录方法对语言学家、人类学家、其他学者和濒危语言社区有长期的好处。为了改进这些方法，需要重新培训和重新聚焦目标，而实现这一目标的一个步骤是举办研讨会，使语言社区积极参与这些目标的制定。这次研讨会不仅将产生记录语言接触的新方法，而且将有助于重塑我们目前提出的各种研究问题。它将包括三个基本部分：(1)考虑濒危语言生态中的多语状态；(2)关注多语言语料库的转录、注释、分析和呈现的工具和方法；(3)运用实验方法记录和研究语言接触过程。

Many of the world's languages are understudied and under-described, and we are facing the loss of a great many of them over the course of this century, a situation more generally known as language endangerment. Linguists are currently interested in documenting, describing and analyzing them while there are still speakers who know the languages. The documentation of endangered languages has to date primarily focused on the creation of monolingual documentary corpora, and yet it is well-known that language endangerment is primarily due to shift in the face of language contact, and not due to catastrophic weather, natural disaster or war. This grant supports a workshop to train linguists in documenting language contact and multilingualism, with special focus on endangered languages. The workshop will bring together specialists in the field who have both experience and are using innovative methods, to provide a forum for training and discussion of issues, methodologies, and best practices. Broader impacts include wider development and dissemination of cutting edge methodologies in language documentation, presentations of current research by early career faculty, and the ability to accommodate a significant audience likely to include graduate students and other participants. A particular practical application in better knowledge of multilingual settings is in speech technology, with direct benefits to society as a whole. The communities of speakers of these languages will also benefit from a better understanding of how they use more than one language in their daily lives.The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (the professional society of linguists in the US) in 2019 in New York City, so as to be accessible to a wide range of linguists and students. Linguists need to document language contact in process, to better understand the linguistic processes that take place in the course of language shift, the kinds of language changes that occur, to provide insights into directionality and rates of change, and the roles of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors involved in language shift. Improving scientific methods of documentation has long-term benefits for linguists, anthropologists, other academics and endangered language communities. To improve these methods requires some retraining and refocusing of goals, and one step toward this is a workshop that enables active engagement of the linguistic community in the formulation of these goals. The workshop will result not only in new methodologies for documenting language contact, but will critically help to reshape the kinds of research questions that we presently ask. It will have three basic parts: (1) consideration of the state of multilingualism in endangered language ecologies; (2) a focus on tools and methods for transcribing, annotating, analyzing and presenting multilingual corpora; and (3) the use of experimental methods in documenting and studying language contact in process.