From language documentation to interdisciplinary regional study

This project examines languages with a range of linguistic features to expand existing language databases and advance our understanding of language evolution, structure and function. Three languages with unusual grammatical structures are documented to facilitate comparative language analyses that can reveal how one language relates to or evolved from another and how speakers address grammatical challenges. Products include grammars, lexicons, and transcribed texts. The project leverages automatic speech recognition technologies and supports student training opportunities. This project documents three languages from a multilingual region. This work, combined with the results of previous projects, will result in the documentation of twenty languages from a multilingual region, allowing for historical and typological study and collaboration with archeologists and geneticists. Specifically, the data from this study will allow linguists to examine how unorthodox grammatical structures come into existence and how other features of language such as tone are utilized. How such unusual systems arise can only be clarified by historical-typological study at regional and language-family levels. 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.