Community-based documentation of lesser-studied language varieties

The documentation, affirmation, and dissemination of imperiled languages can promote pride for language communities and, amid histories of exclusion and persecution, a sense of belonging, dignity, and engagement with heritage and history. This documentation project promotes broad community-driven access to generational linguistic knowledge through publicly accessible materials, such as recordings of stories, songs, and disappearing dialects. This project also creates a "listening room" to be visited by teachers and students, language advocates, and scholars. In conjunction with language documentation, this project makes new discoveries about language by studying the variation and diversity of language structures. This project enhances language equity through outreach programs involving a partnership with a community organization. Other benefits to society include providing educational opportunities for the scientific study of language and language documentation. This project is jointly funded by Dynamic Language Infrastructure-Documenting Endangered Languages, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Linguistics. This project entails community-driven documentation of critically endangered, rarely studied, and infrequently documented languages. The documentation process yields transcribed and translated narratives in an open-access, permanently archived collection. The project develops a research-enriched, community-based interactive multimedia space and learning site for public use and develops scholarly research on linguistic patterns. The project investigates the variation and diversity of language structures. The project uses methodologies that further establish an interdisciplinary, open-access approach to endangered language documentation. By combining relatively new archival practices with traditional models of community-based participatory fieldwork, this project aims to provide new advancements in the speed, scope, and scale of meaningful documentation of endangered languages. 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.