Establishing a Dynamic Language Infrastructure Community of Science

The human heritage and knowledge encoded in endangered and under-documented languages constitutes scientific data that must be preserved. To meet this need, language documentation research must include perspectives and best practices from a diverse array of experts, approaches, and stakeholders. This project brings together established and junior scholars and knowledge-holders from fields such as Anthropology, Arctic Studies, Geography, Language and Health, Linguistics, Political Science, Social Psychology, and Information Sciences, to create outputs that define, exemplify, and promote sustainable and impactful cross-disciplinary language documentation research.

These experts formulate new research questions and methodologies, and build collaborative work plans that bridge language documentation with areas such as computational infrastructure, data management, and convergence research more generally. The programming strengthens capacity in language research infrastructure that crosses discipline boundaries and also strengthens connections between those in the academy and communities, advancing transformative knowledge in the language sciences.

This project includes participation by junior scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and representatives of Indigenous communities, diversifying the field of language documentation and training the next generation of researchers in this area.

The participants in this project represent diverse experiences, skill sets, and perspectives about how language documentation can ethically and impactfully converge with, and benefit from, other fields. The methods include repeated meetings to survey existing work, to define or re-define research problems and research questions, to align terminology from different disciplines, to address challenges regarding ethics and community participation, and to identify broader impacts of language documentation.

The outcomes of this project are disseminated through a position paper and through peer-reviewed “State of the Art” (SoTA) review articles, all co-authored by project participants. The SoTA review articles present examples of research questions and methods that convergence work advances. This programming also creates actionable recommendations that help scholars from multiple disciplines to generate fundable proposals in language documentation research.

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.