Endangered languages in contact: A multilingual spoken corpus for language documentation and research

该项目记录和分析了一组濒危语言变体，这些语言变体在语言多样的边境地区使用，这些语言变体在相互接触中发展了数百年。本文还考察了濒危方言与近缘方言的具体情况，这些方言在语言濒危研究中被忽视了。因此，这个项目将为我们提供重要的信息，可以帮助我们理解语言变异和变化的基本问题，并将作出理论贡献，可推广到其他语言接触的情况。对未得到充分研究和濒危语言的记录对于保存文化知识和推进关于人类语言的科学理论非常重要。濒危语言需要在更广泛的生态背景下进行研究，以便更好地理解语言接触，维护和转变的过程：这包括心理背景，（不同变体在双语或多语者头脑中的相互作用）和社会学背景（少数民族语言变体之间的具体关系及其与标准语言的相互作用，以及这些不同的品种如何在社会中作为传播媒介发挥作用）。该项目创建了一个在线搜索口语语料库，将允许对多语种使用者的语言变异和语码转换做法进行定量分析。它利用现有资源开发一个开源管道，用于处理和注释资源不足的多语言数据。语料库界面将被构建为一个Shiny应用程序，它可以与其他语料库一起使用，并允许数据可视化和统计分析的许多其他可能性，因为它使用流行的R软件环境。网络界面的设计也将便利非专业人员的使用，以便使对该地区语言和文化遗产或对语言维护和振兴感兴趣的当地社区成员能够获得这些数据。该奖项是国家科学基金会和国家人文基金会为NSF动态语言基础设施- NEH记录濒危语言计划建立的资助伙伴关系的一部分。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project documents and analyzes a group of endangered language varieties spoken in a linguistically diverse border region, which have developed in contact with one another for hundreds of years. It also examines the specific situation of endangered dialects in contact with closely related varieties, which have been unduly ignored in research on language endangerment. This project will therefore provide us with important information that can help us understand fundamental issues of language variation and change, and will make theoretical contributions that are generalizable to other language-contact situations. Documentation of understudied and endangered languages is important for the preservation of cultural knowledge and for the advancement of scientific theories about human language. Endangered languages need to be studied in their broader ecological context in order to better understand the processes of language contact, maintenance, and shift: this includes the psychological context (the interaction of different varieties in the minds of bi- or multilingual speakers) and the sociological context (the specific relations among minoritized varieties and their interactions with standard languages, and how these different varieties function within society as mediums of communication). The project creates an online searchable spoken corpus that will allow for the quantitative analysis of language variation and code-switching practices by multilingual speakers. It leverages existing resources to develop an open-source pipeline for processing and annotating multilingual data from under-resourced varieties. The corpus interface will be built as a Shiny application, which can be adapted for use with other corpora and which allows many other possibilities for data visualization and statistical analysis, since it uses the popular R software environment. The web interface will also be designed to facilitate use by non-specialists, in order to make these data accessible to members of the local communities who are interested in the linguistic and cultural heritage of the region or in language maintenance and revitalization. This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program.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.