USA - Federal Agencies Take Action to Digitally Document Nearly 50 Endangered Languages

Tue Aug 9 20:21:41 UTC 2011

Press Release 11-161

Federal Agencies Take Action to Digitally Document Nearly 50
Endangered Languages
NEH and NSF award $3.9 million to preserve languages threatened with extinction

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=121353&org=NSF&from=news

August 9, 2011

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National
Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the award of 10 fellowships
and 24 institutional grants totaling $3.9 million in the agencies'
ongoing Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program.

This is the seventh round of their campaign to preserve records of
languages threatened with extinction. Experts estimate that more than
half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are
bound for oblivion in this century, and the window of opportunity for
high-quality language field documentation, they say, narrows with each
passing year.

These new DEL awards will support digital documentation work on almost
50 endangered languages, enhance the computational infrastructure of
the field and provide training for the next generation of researchers.

For example, no more than a handful of speakers, all elderly, remain
of Karuk and Yurok, two indigenous languages of northern California.
The existing scholarly literature includes little information about
their discourse and word order patterns.

A new DEL grant to Andrew Garrett will enable field workers from the
University of California, Berkeley, to work with these speakers to
analyze legacy field notes, narratives and other archival materials
collected by several linguists during the 20th century and to collect
new information about how they organize words and phrases into
sentences.  The project will create a new collection of language
materials for each language, fully annotated for use by researchers
who are interested in the grammatical structure of sentences. In
addition, Crystal Richardson, a member of the Karuk community, will
complement the work on Karuk by recording oral histories and natural
conversational speech in both audio and video form, supported by a DEL
fellowship.

"We must do our best to document endangered languages before they fall
silent," urged NSF Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral &
Economic Sciences Myron Gutmann. "Endangered languages are an
irreplaceable source of linguistic and cognitive information, and
recent advances in information technology make it possible to
integrate and analyze that body of knowledge more comprehensively."

Some DEL projects seek evidence about what is universal in language,
and what those universals might tell us about human cognition. With
support from a grant to SUNY at Buffalo, Jürgen Bohnemeyer is
investigating how people represent the concept of space in 25
languages spoken on five continents. If people talk about objects in
space differently, do they also think about them differently?

A separate DEL fellowship will allow Pedro Mateo-Pedro, a native
speaker of Q'anjobal, to study children's acquisition of Chuj, a
related Mayan language which is among the most endangered of all the
Mayan languages. Since studies of children's language acquisition have
focused primarily on Indo-European languages, this project will
contribute significantly to the scope of scientific knowledge.
Mateo-Pedro's project will involve training community members in
language documentation and analysis.

"Language is integral to what makes us human," said NEH Chairman Jim
Leach. "When a language disappears before it is documented, it limits
our understanding of the way that people interact with their social
and natural environments. By supporting the creation of dictionaries,
grammars and digital archives, the DEL program preserves and makes
accessible a rich set of cultural information that reflects the
traditions and accumulated wisdom of peoples who have lived and
thrived on our shared planet."

DEL awards to the University of Connecticut and the University of
Alaska Fairbanks will enable Jonathan Bobaljik and David Koester to
study Itelmen, a highly endangered language spoken natively by fewer
than 20 persons on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. This
collaborative project will compile audio and video for a dictionary of
the Itelmen language.

Another DEL grant will allow linguist Scott Rushforth and the
Mescalero Apache Tribe to develop a dictionary and grammar of
Mescalero Apache, an Athabaskan language spoken in southern New Mexico
which has fewer than 900 remaining speakers. The project will analyze
the complex structure of verbs in the language and contribute to
comparative work on the phonetics and phonology of the entire
Athabaskan language family.

As part of the data collection, researchers will record and transcribe
narratives, which also will capture the historical memory not only of
the Mescalero, but also of the Chiricahua and Lipan Apache, throughout
the period of the U.S. "settlement" of the west and post-relocation
times.

In addition, a dissertation award to the University of Texas at Austin
will allow John Sullivant, under the direction of Anthony Woodbury, to
produce a reference grammar of Tataltepec de Valdés Chatino, a
language of Oaxaca, Mexico, now spoken by fewer than two thousand
people. The language has several uncommon grammatical features,
including a rich system of lexical tone and unusually intricate rules
for the interaction of tones.

A major goal of DEL is to enhance the training of both academic
linguists and community members in documentary linguistics, say
researchers. A number of recently awarded DEL projects support this
goal.

A DEL grant to the University of Kansas will enable Arienne Dwyer to
organize and direct a six-week institute in language documentation and
research, featuring two weeks of intensive workshops on the practice
of documentary linguistics, followed by a Practicum, a four-week
apprenticeship in applying linguistic science and technology to
on-site empirical documentation.

Another DEL grant will enable Mary Linn and Colleen Fitzgerald to
present an Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project
in 2012. Oklahoma has the highest Native language diversity in the
United States, and all of the thirty-nine Native languages are
endangered.

DEL already provided support for a national Breath of Life Workshop
held at the National Museum of the American Indian in June of this
year.

Another DEL grant will support a project directed by Durbin Feeling, a
fluent speaker of Cherokee and a member of the Cherokee Nation, to
study the prosody of Cherokee, a severely endangered Iroquoian
language. This project will add information about lexical tone and
vowel length for each entry in the Cherokee Electronic Dictionary,
filling a gap in the available resources on Cherokee grammar.

Another DEL fellowship will allow Joshua Brown of Salish Kootenai
College to record and transcribe natural discourse texts in Bitterroot
Salish, which has only 30 remaining speakers, mostly elderly; his
project will train younger community members to conduct documentary
research on their ancestral language.

A complete listing of this year's awards follows.

Fellowships ($50,400 each, unless otherwise noted. Awarded by NEH):

Adam Baker, independent scholar, "Wakhi language documentation"

Rosemary Beam-de-Azcona, independent scholar, "Coatec Zapotec
dictionary, texts and video"

Joshua Brown, Salish Kootenai College, "Documenting the Salish language"

Susan Kalt, Roxbury Community College, "Documenting Children's Cuzco
Quechua in Bolivia and Peru"

Pedro Mateo-Pedro, Harvard University, "Acquisition of an Endangered
Mayan Language: a Corpus of Child Chuj"

Kenneth McElhanon, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics,
"Comparative dictionary and digital recordings for Huon Peninsula
languages"

Stacey Oberly, University of Arizona, "Documenting Naturally Occurring Ute"

Crystal Richardson, independent scholar, "Digital Field Documentation
of Karuk: Eliciting natural speech through conversation"

Aviva Shimelman, San Jose State University, "Documentation of Yauyos"

Timothy Thornes, University of Central Arkansas, "A Grammar of the
Northern Paiute Language," ($25,200)

Institutional Grants (awarded by NSF or NEH, as indicated):

Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan University, "Collaborative
Research: Endangered Languages Catalog (ELCat)," $151,455 (NSF)

Jonathan Bobaljik, University of Connecticut, "Collaborative Research:
Integrated Audio/Visual Documentation of Itelmen," $191,639 (NSF)

Jürgen Bohnemeyer, SUNY at Buffalo, "Spatial language and cognition
beyond Mesoamerica," $255,901 (NSF)

Brenda Bowser, California State University Fullerton, "RAPID: Záparo
RAPID Documentation Project (ZRDP)," $14,999 (NSF)

Lyle Campbell, University of Hawaii, "Collaborative Research:
Endangered Languages Catalog (ELCat)," $256,138 (NSF)

Peter Cole, University of Delaware, "Endangered Malayic Languages of
Sumatra," $219,983 (NSF)

Arienne Dwyer, University of Kansas, "CoLang: Institute for
Collaborative Language Research," $174,609 (NSF)

Arienne Dwyer, University of Kansas, "Interactive Inner Asia:
documenting an endangered language contact area," $259,220 (NSF)

Durbin Feeling, Cherokee Nation, "Collaborative Research: Documenting
Cherokee Tone and Vowel Length," $79,349 (NSF)

Colleen Fitzgerald, University of Texas at Arlington, "Collaborative
Research: Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project,"
$47,881 (NSF)

Andrew Garrett, University of California, Berkeley, "Karuk and Yurok
syntax and text documentation," $154,425 (NSF)

Lenore Grenoble, University of Chicago, "The lexicon of a
polysynthetic language," $256,633 (NSF)

John Haviland, University of California San Diego, "Zinacantec Family
Home Sign: Structure and Socialization in the First and Second
Generations of a Spontaneous Emerging Sign Language," $100,000 (NSF)

Dylan Herrick, University of Oklahoma Norman Campus, "Collaborative
Research: Documenting Cherokee Tone and Vowel Length," $36,242 (NSF)

David Koester, University of Alaska Fairbanks, "Collaborative
Research: Integrated Audio/Visual Documentation of Itelmen," $276,500
(NSF)

Nicole Lim, California Indian Museum and Cultural Center,
"Conversational Pomo Documentation Project," $75,000 (NSF)

Mary Linn, University of Oklahoma Norman Campus, "Collaborative
Research: Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project,"
$42,859 (NSF)

Carolyn MacKay, Ball State University, "A Dictionary of Pisaflores
Tepehua," $200,000 (NEH)

Teresa McCarty, Arizona State University, "RAPID: Documenting
Critically Endangered Mojave Bird Songs in Authentic Cultural
Contexts," $25,000 (NSF)

Joyce McDonough, University of Rochester, "Workshop and Training for
Undergraduates in  Field Linguistics," $18,550 (NSF)

Lev Michael, University of California, Berkeley, "The Maihiki Project:
Documenting, describing and revitalizing a Western Tukanoan language,"
$199,990 (NSF)

Craig Mishler, independent scholar, Anchorage AK, "Linguistic
Ethnography: Gwich'in Caribou Anatomy and Cultural Ecology," $115,245
(NSF)

Lizette Peter, University of Kansas, "Collaborative Research:
Documenting Cherokee Tone and Vowel Length," $41,795 (NSF)

James Rementer, The Delaware Tribe, "Lenape Language Database
Project," $46,830 (NSF)

Scott Rushforth, Mescalero Apache Tribe, "Mescalero Apache Language
Project," $321,200 (NEH)

David Yetman, University of Arizona, "RAPID: Documenting whistled
speech among Chinantecans," $14,389 (NSF)

Doctoral Dissertation awards (awarded by NSF) [the first name is the
faculty advisor, the second name is the graduate student conducting
the dissertation research]

Melissa Axelrod & Logan Sutton, University of New Mexico,
"Kiowa-Tanoan: a diachronic and synchronic study," $10,000

Nora England & Gabriela Garcia, University of Texas at Austin,
"Documentation of Southeastern Tepehuan: a corpus of annotated texts,"
$11,792

Patience Epps & Ana Brandão, University of Texas at Austin, "A
Reference Grammar of Paresi-Haliti (Arawak)," $7,378

Lenore Grenoble & Juan Bueno Holle, University of Chicago,
"Documenting information structure in Isthmus Zapotec," $12,000

Mary Linn & Amber Neely, University of Oklahoma, "Speaking Kiowa Today," $11,199

Sean O'Neill & Elizabeth Kickham, University of Oklahoma Norman
Campus, "Choctaw Language Ideologies and their Impact on Teaching and
Learning," $12,831

Anthony Woodbury & John Sullivant, University of Texas at Austin,
"Research on Tataltepec de Valdés Chatino," $10,705

-NSF-