Documenting directional systems of a morphologically complex endangered language in contact with another indigenous language

Minority languages across the world are endangered. One of the main reasons for language endangerment concerns the decrease of elderly population who still speak an endangered language fluently. The way elders speak is different from what younger generations speak.

This difference is observed in the use of their verbs that are more complex. Verbs of elders exhibit a wide variety of semantic nuances that can be best interpreted in the cultural context where an endangered language is spoken. Furthermore, elders preserve a valuable knowledge of their language tied to their culture.

However, the decrease of the elderly population and the lack of documentation and preservation of such languages across the globe is leading to a significant linguistic and cultural loss.

This research project documents a morphologically complex endangered language spoken by elders with a unique linguistic background. The elders are fluent in two morphologically complex endangered languages. The goal is to document naturalistic use of one of the endangered languages used by elders and create a digital corpus.

This project collects data on directional systems expressed through verbal morphology. These types of studies describing aspects of spatial communication and cognition constitute a big gap in the literature cross-linguistically. Likewise, contact between two morphologically complex languages remains an understudied area in the language sciences.

This project facilitates new ways of studying language contact. Additionally, this project’s broader impacts involve training a pioneering group of speakers of endangered languages and producing a set of community-oriented materials.

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.