United States Supports Research To Document Endangered Languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

United States Supports Research To Document Endangered Languages

National Science Foundation, National Endowment for Humanities give
grants
http://newsblaze.com/story/20061207145244tsop.nb/newsblaze/TOPSTORY/Top-Stories.html

Throughout the world, thousands of languages are at risk of
disappearing, but researchers are documenting and recording these
linguistic links to history.

Examples abound: Only one-fourth of the Northern Cheyenne tribe in
Montana speak their native language. In Nigeria, Defaka is spoken by
just 200 people. And there are fewer than a dozen native speakers of
N/uu, one of several African languages that use distinctive clicks for
some consonants.

A program sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) - Documenting Endangered
Languages - has awarded $9.4 million over the past two years to
researchers and native speakers seeking to document and create digital
records of languages threatened with extinction. About half of the
grants support work on American Indian languages.

More than half of the world's 7,000 existing languages "are headed for
oblivion in this century," according to an NEH/NSF press release. One
reason is globalization: People increasingly find it necessary to do
business in the most widely spoken languages, such as Chinese, English,
Spanish, Russian and Hindi. The Internet and print and television media
also speed the rate of language loss. Ten languages account for nearly
80 percent of Internet users, with English and Chinese alone accounting
for 42 percent, according to internetstats.com, a search engine that
provides Internet, business, financial and advertising statistics.

By creating audio and video recordings, transcriptions, dictionaries and
grammatical guides, linguists can work with speakers of a language to
create a permanent digital archive. These materials can be put on the
Internet "and suddenly it opens up the language to the entire world,"
said Doug Whalen, an NSF program director.

Linguists are working with the N/uu speakers, who live on the southern
edge of the Kalahari Desert, to create a dictionary and grammar that
will support research into the language and history of the people and
help the N/uu teach their children to write the language. Linguist
Amanda Miller of Cornell University uses a portable ultrasound machine
to produce images of the way the tongue moves when a N/uu speaker makes
clicks and other complicated sounds.

"When I go to southern Africa, I have people [from other ethnic groups]
say, 'When will you come back and work on my language?'" said Bonny
Sands of Northern Arizona University, one of three principal
investigators for the project. "People understand how important
language is."

Africa has the highest concentration of disappearing languages,
according to UNESCO. Akinbiyi Akinlabi of Rutgers University received a
grant to document Defaka, which has only 200 speakers, and Nkoroo, a
related language that has 5,000 speakers. "No language should be
allowed to die out without being scientifically documented," he said.
"A language tells us about the culture of a people, their way of life,
their history."

In both Sands' and Akinlabi's projects, as well as most others funded
under Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL), graduate students, native
speakers and other investigators from the country that hosts a language
play vital roles in the research.

"The quality of the data is much higher if native speakers are involved
in decision-making and data collection," said Arienne Dwyer of the
University of Kansas, who employs two dozen people in China for a
project to prepare a grammar of Monguor, an unwritten endangered
Mongolic language of northern Tibet.

Dwyer stressed that the DEL projects focus on documentation. "It's not
our business to decide whether a language survives or disappears," she
said. "We can only present ourselves as resource people."

Helen Aguera, acting deputy director for preservation at NEH, said the
program can "help create the resources that the community will be able
to adapt and use for their own efforts at revitalization." For example,
a scholarly grammar book or dictionary can be simplified into a
"learner's dictionary" for use in teaching.

Veronica Grondona of Eastern Michigan University is documenting Wichi, a
language that has about 25,000 speakers in northern Argentina and
Bolivia but is considered endangered because children are not learning
it in sufficient numbers and because of the population's intense
contact with Spanish speakers.

She said she was working in the community on two other indigenous
languages "and the Wichi speakers came to us and said, 'We want you to
document our language and help us preserve our language.'"

Grondona always meets with the chiefs of the community to determine what
they want, such as interviewing as many elders as possible or producing
teaching materials.

"In many cases you end up doing work that may help in the maintenance of
the language because the speakers ask you to do that," she said.

NEH and NSF are evaluating applications for 2007 DEL grants, whose
recipients will be announced next spring.

A special report on endangered languages and lists of DEL grantees for
2005 and 2006 are available on the NSF Web site.

For more information on U.S. policies, see Population and Diversity.

Source: U.S. Department of State

judythpiazza at gmail.com
Copyright © 2006, NewsBlaze, Daily News