Agencies Partner to Document Endangered Languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Agencies Partner to Document Endangered Languages
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/7780

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH) announced the recipients of 13 fellowships and
26 institutional grants as part of the agencies' joint Documenting
Endangered Languages (DEL) project—a new, multi-year effort to
digitally archive at-risk languages before they become extinct. Experts
estimate that almost half of the world's 6000-7000 existing languages
are endangered. The DEL awards, totaling $4.4 million, will support the
digital documentation of more than 70 of them.

"Endangered languages are an irreplaceable source of linguistic and
cognitive information," according to NSF Director Arden L. Bement, Jr.
"Modern cyberinfrastructure tools enable us to investigate these
phenomena more exactly and more comprehensively."

The DEL grants support a variety of researchers and reflect efforts to
document dying languages around the globe. For example, the Museum of
the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, N.C. was awarded a grant to translate
and digitize 19th-century Cherokee language materials from the
Smithsonian Institution. Scientists at Cornell and Northern Arizona
Universities will gather ultrasound and airflow data to determine just
how the "click" sounds of South Africa's N/u language are produced.
Only 13 fluent N/u speakers remain. Kristine Stenzel from the
University of Colorado will document and analyze Piratapuyo--an Amazon
language that uses an extremely rare word order: Object-Verb-Subject.

Researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks will digitize 1,000
Yup'ik audio recordings for storage at the Arctic Region Supercomputing
Center and assess the feasibility of creating a Northern Indigenous
Languages Archive for the region's 200 endangered languages. Three DEL
fellowship awardees will independently document several endangered
Austronesian languages--including ones spoken in Taiwan, the
Philippines and on Easter Island. On Easter Island, use of Rapa Nui
declined from 77 percent to 7.5 percent among elementary school
children over a 20-year period.

"This is a rescue mission to save endangered languages," says NEH
Chairman Bruce Cole of the DEL program. "Language is the DNA of a
culture, and it is the vehicle for the traditions, customs, stories,
history, and beliefs of a people. A lost language is a lost culture.
Fortunately, with the aid of modern technology and these federal funds,
linguistic scholars can document and record these languages before they
become extinct."

>From National Science Foundation