Investigating language use in a multilingual community

对多语言人群在日常生活中使用不同语言的方式的研究，导致了关于语言的认知，社会和文化方面的重要科学发现。在全球化的压力下，有一种使用多种语言的现象越来越普遍，这种现象发生在小而紧密的社区，其中一种语言濒临灭绝。对这些情况进行科学调查的重要性是双重的。首先，人们对多语言人群从一种语言转向另一种语言的过程知之甚少。第二，包含重要知识的濒危语言往往是记录和研究最少的。这种情况的一个重要例子是苏门答腊西南部的鼻语社区，这是一个充满语言多样性和异常复杂的多语言环境的地区。这个多语言社区的惊人之处在于，濒危语言Nasal直到2007年才被语言学家所知，迄今为止，它还没有成为任何重要研究的主题。然而，初步的田野调查显示，纳萨尔有独特的语言特性，如独特的动词词缀，提出不同的意义有关的“完整性”的行动。该项目是夏威夷大学马诺阿分校（UHM）、印度尼西亚Atma Jaya天主教大学和Nasal社区之间的国际合作。它将为印度尼西亚的教师和社区成员以及美国和印度尼西亚的学生提供重要的语言学培训。它还将促进美国和印度尼西亚之间的双边关系。更广泛的影响还包括UHM博士生的专业发展和演讲事件录音的公共存储库，以及来自美国和印度尼西亚的学者和Nasal社区成员可以访问的录音。这个项目将记录印尼本库鲁省的鼻语社区的语言实践，这代表了一个特别复杂的社会语言学情况。这个社区是多语言的，其中Nasal（nsy）是一种濒临灭绝的马来-波利尼西亚分离物，几乎没有现有的文献，在日常互动中与南巴里桑马来语（SBM;）和Kaur（vkk）一起使用。这个项目的主要目的是记录Nasal的所有多语言复杂性。因此，该项目将在其多语言背景下制作大量的Nasal视听文件，并附有全面的语法描述。这些材料为研究紧密联系的社区中的多语言现象、印度尼西亚西部的历史以及鼻音中独特的动词词缀的性质提供了重要的数据。此外，随着历史语言学家和考古学家将印度尼西亚西部的历史拼凑在一起，来自纳萨尔的额外数据有可能从根本上改变这一局面。具体活动包括：（i）收集一个大型的鼻语音社区的语言实践的视听语料库，（ii）编制一个多语种的词典，（iii）指导一个博士生谁将写一篇关于鼻语音的论文，和（四）起草一份鼻音参考语法和考尔草图语法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响进行评估，被认为值得支持审查标准。

Research into the ways in which multilingual people use different languages in the course of their everyday lives has led to important scientific discoveries about the cognitive, social, and cultural aspects of language. One type of multilingualism that is increasingly prevalent under pressures from globalization occurs in small, tight-knit communities wherein one of the languages being spoken is endangered. The importance of scientific investigations of these situations is twofold. First, little is known about the processes at play when multilingual people shift away from one of the languages. Second, the endangered language, which encapsulates important knowledge, often has been the least documented and researched. One important example of this situation is found in the Nasal speech community in southwest Sumatra, a region full of linguistic diversity and exceptionally complex multilingual situations. What is striking about this multilingual community is that the endangered language, Nasal, was not known by linguists until 2007, and to date it has not been the subject of any significant research. Yet, preliminary fieldwork reveals Nasal has unique linguistic properties, such as unique verbal affixes that present disparate meanings related to the "completeness" of an action. This project is an international collaboration between the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM), Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, and Nasal community. It will provide important training in linguistics to faculty and community members in Indonesia, and students in the US and Indonesia. It will also foster binational relationships between the US and Indonesia. The broader impacts also include the professional development of a UHM doctoral student and a public repository of recordings of speech events and their transcriptions that can be accessed by scholars from the US and Indonesia and Nasal community members. This project will document the linguistic practices of the Nasal speech community, which represents an especially complex sociolinguistic situation in Bengkulu province, Indonesia. This community is multilingual where Nasal (nsy), an endangered Malayo-Polynesian isolate with little existing documentation, is used alongside South Barisan Malay (SBM; pse) and Kaur (vkk) in everyday interactions. The primary aim of this project is to document Nasal in all of its multilingual complexity. Thus, this project will produce extensive audiovisual documentation of Nasal in its multilingual context accompanied by a comprehensive grammatical description. These materials provide crucial data into the study of multilingualism in tight-knit communities, the history of western Indonesia, and the nature of unique verbal affixes in Nasal. Furthermore, as historical linguists and archeologists piece together the history of western Indonesia, additional data from Nasal has the potential to radically alter this picture. Specific activities include: (i) assemble a large audiovisual corpus of the linguistic practices of the Nasal speech community, (ii) compile a multilingual lexicon, (iii) mentor a doctoral student who will write a dissertation on Nasal, and (iv) draft a Nasal reference grammar and Kaur sketch grammar.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.