Language Documentation Project Research Articles

Some Aspects of Lexical Variation in Na-Našo/-u (Molise, Italy)

Molise Croatian is a Štokavian Ikavian variety brought from the East Adriatic coast to the region of Molise at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century. Today it is spoken in three out of four officially recognized Croatian Molise villages in the region of Molise in south Italy, namely those of Mundimitar / Montemitro, Kruč / Acquaviva Collecroce, and Filič / San Felice del Molise, but even there its use has been declining, and intergenerational transmission is interrupted in some parts of the community. The aim of the paper is to present and discuss aspects of diatopic variation in lexicon between the three local varieties on the basis of the terms collected in a local language documentation project and published in Vocabolario polinomico (Sportelli linguistici 2020).

Revitalising Endangered Languages: Challenges, Successes, and Cultural Implications

Language is a cornerstone of cultural identity, yet many of the world's languages are at risk of disappearing, either historically or as a result of deliberate actions by aggressive neighboring states, if not appropriately addressed. This paper examined worldwide endeavors to safeguard endangered languages and the cultural customs interwoven with them, using a case study of Ukraine and Russia. By conducting quantitative and qualitative analyses of the obtained data, the study focused on the case study design, based on document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and structured surveys. The findings highlighted the key successes in language revitalisation, mainly focusing on educational initiatives and technology-based solutions. Efforts such as community-led language schools, language documentation projects, and digital platforms have demonstrated potential in maintaining Ukrainian as a presently endangered language in territories militarily occupied by Russia and previously annexed areas, providing direct communication channels to counter an aggressor's objectives. Additionally, the role of government policies and international organisations in supporting language preservation was analysed, revealing how collaborative approaches can foster linguistic and cultural resilience. Significant challenges were identified. These challenges encompassed inadequate funding and limited local and global community engagement, and the complex dynamics of cultural assimilation because of fear and threat to life in the occupied lands. Moreover, the impact of language extinction on the cultural survival of minority groups (those few Ukrainian speaking or bilingual – Ukrainian and Russian, speaking people with the core values of the Ukrainian culture and identity) is profound, often leading to a loss of unique worldviews, oral traditions, and identity. The paper concluded with recommendations for future initiatives in language revitalisation, emphasising the need for holistic approaches that integrate the cultural understanding, technology, and community empowerment. It was contended that by tackling these issues, stakeholders can play a role in preserving not just languages but also the diverse tapestry of cultures they embody.

Contributions of the Linguistic Documentation to the Strengthening of the Ikpeng Language at School

In this paper, we present the activities and products developed during the Ikpeng language documentation project that contributed to the strengthening of the teaching of mother language of this indigenous society at the school, a space in which the use and teaching of the Portuguese language predominates. The Ikpeng linguistic documentation process was set within the Projeto de Documentação de Línguas Indígenas (PRODOCLIN), promoted by Museu do Índio/FUNAI, in partnership with UNESCO, during the period from 2009 to 2012. Among the main contributions of the documentation project are a sociolinguistic diagnosis, the creation of a lexical database, the elaboration of a descriptive grammar of the Ikpeng language, the publication of a monolingual book of traditional narratives and training courses in linguistics for indigenous teachers. The products resulting from the documentation were developed based on the demands of the school context of the Ikpeng society, to preserve and value the language and ancestral memories of this indigenous society. The Ikpeng language is spoken by the homonymous people, who live in the Parque Indígena do Xingu – MT.

Adapting multilingual speech representation model for a new, underresourced language through multilingual fine-tuning and continued pretraining

In recent years, neural models learned through self-supervised pretraining on large scale multilingual text or speech data have exhibited promising results for underresourced languages, especially when a relatively large amount of data from related language(s) is available. While the technology has a potential for facilitating tasks carried out in language documentation projects, such as speech transcription, pretraining a multilingual model from scratch for every new language would be highly impractical. We investigate the possibility for adapting an existing multilingual wav2vec 2.0 model for a new language, focusing on actual fieldwork data from a critically endangered tongue: Ainu. Specifically, we (i) examine the feasibility of leveraging data from similar languages also in fine-tuning; (ii) verify whether the model’s performance can be improved by further pretraining on target language data. Our results show that continued pretraining is the most effective method to adapt a wav2vec 2.0 model for a new language and leads to considerable reduction in error rates. Furthermore, we find that if a model pretrained on a related speech variety or an unrelated language with similar phonological characteristics is available, multilingual fine-tuning using additional data from that language can have positive impact on speech recognition performance when there is very little labeled data in the target language.

A Preliminary Sketch of Phonology of Limbu Spoken in Sikkim

This paper aims to provide a preliminary sketch of Limbu phonology based on the field recordings conducted under an ongoing Sikkim’s Endangered Language Documentation Project (SELDP) in Sikkim University, India. In the Limbu variety spoken in Sikkim there are 18 consonant phonemes that contrast in the manner and place of articulation. A complementary distribution is observed between various pairs, especially between voiceless and voiced obstruents. Limbu has 11 monophthongs but lacks diphthongs. The canonical form of a syllable is (C)(C)V(C). The rule that regulates syllabication is the Maximal Onset rule. This paper focuses on the analysis of phonological and syllabification rules followed by the language.

Emerging Vitality in “Endangered” Forms of Verbal Art in Naso

Abstract: This article provides evidence of change in verbal art in Naso (Chibchan, Panama). ‘Profound words’ ( tjlõkwo rong ) are ideologized as a poetic lexical category practiced exclusively by Naso ancestors, but are emergent in practice. Profound words number upwards of four hundred lexical constructions of different patternings, but primarily difrasismos . In a language documentation project, Nasos innovatively determine membership in the profound words category on the basis of formal analogization to difrasismos , and noncompositional meaning. Thus, the category is productively and creatively determined.

Multilingualism and the heteroglossia of ideologies in Lower Fungom (Cameroon)

Located at the northwestern edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields, Lower Fungom is a rural, linguistically highly diverse region (pop. ca. 12,000) where individual multilingualism in three local languages plus Cameroonian Pidgin English (henceforth CPE) is the norm, with a minority also speaking Cameroonian English. This article focuses on the different types of identity that can be projected via the use of English, CPE, and the local languages. Data come from language documentation projects and include self-reports, ethnographic observations, and analysis of language use. Such a diverse dataset allows us to uncover and discuss a number of aspects of the local language ideologies. Key here is the recognition that only exoglossic languages allow the representation of different identities qua membership in stereotypical categories – such as the case of English, which calls up stereotypes connected with authority and prestige – whereas the use of local languages is associated with village affiliation and, hence, relational rather than categorical identities. This ideological layer is not regimented by any form of prestige- or domain-based compartmentalization and, therefore, can hardly be captured by classical theories such as Fishman’s (1967) extended diglossia theory, whose limits in doing research on African rural settings are highlighted. Also, inspired by Jenks and Lee (2016), this article suggests the existence of a heteroglossia of ideologies of personal identity (relational vs. categorical) most likely determined by the relatively recent entry of English in the local language ecology.

Utilizing the Matched-guise as a Method of Examining Perceptual Change in an Endangered Creole

AbstractThis article concerns the use of a matched-guise task in a language documentation project, showing how such a perceptual tool can be used to highlight ongoing language change and attitudes towards an endangered language. Baba Malay, an endangered creole spoken by the Peranakans, has two forms of words encoding coarseness or refinedness. Words ending with [–al], [-aɾ], and [-as], such as [tampal] ‘mend’, [bakaɾ] ‘burn’, and [nanas] ‘pineapple’ are recognized by speakers as kasar ‘coarse’, in contrast to alus ‘refined’ forms ending with [-ɛ], such as [tampɛ] ‘mend’, [bakɛ] ‘burn’, and [nanɛ] ‘pineapple’. Language documentation work shows younger and less proficient speakers producing less refined forms than older and more proficient speakers. No such trend is found for coarse forms. A matched-guise task incorporated into a language documentation project shows that younger community members perceive the refined form as being more emblematic of the Peranakan language, culture, and community. In addition to results that highlight the ongoing language change, the implication is that quantitative perceptual work and language documentation are highly complementary

Attitudes towards Belhare, Nepali and English

Abstract This paper reports on a sociolinguistic study of the Belhare speech community which is a part of the Belhare language documentation project funded by the Language Commission of the government of Nepal in 2018. This article presents sociolinguistic information on Belhare, a lesser known speech community originally settled in Dhankuta, east Nepal. The main contribution of this paper is to examine domains of language use, language use among generations, attitude towards Belhare, Nepali and English, Belhare speakers as multilingual speakers, languages resources and language proficiency among children.

The long and short of it

AbstractPlacenames (toponyms) give insight into relationships involving people, place, and language. An exemplary placename derived from long-term engagement within the sensitive linguistic ecology of Norfolk Island in the South Pacific is used to detail how a fusing of linguistic analysis, words, and cultural memory is beneficial for what constitutes an ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology. Differences between the ethnographic method and an ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology are presented. This enduring and keyed-in commitment with Norfolk Island’s social and natural surroundings offers significant perceptiveness into and suggestions about how prolonged ecolinguistic work can be beneficial to language documentation projects, particular those incorporating lexical (word) and semantic (memory) description.

Developing without Developers: Choosing Labor-saving Tools for Language Documentation Apps

Application software has the potential to greatly reduce the amount of human labor needed in common language documentation tasks. But despite great advances in the maturity of tools available for apps, language documentation apps have not attained their full potential, and language documentation projects are forgoing apps in favor of less specialized tools like paper and spreadsheets. We argue that this is due to the scarcity of software development labor in language documentation, and that a careful choice of software development tools could make up for this labor shortage by increasing developer productivity. We demonstrate the benefits of strategic tool choice by reimplementing a subset of the popular linguistic annotation app ELAN using tools carefully selected for their potential to minimize developer labor.

Acoustic correlates of prominence in Yawarana

Yawarana (Cariban) is a critically endangered language of Venezuela, with 20–30 speakers and little published research beyond wordlists. In these wordlists, orthographic indications of stress and/or vowel length are inconsistent. As part of our language documentation project, we examine acoustic correlates of prominence in Yawarana. Many other languages in the Cariban family have a clear rhythmic stress system, with vowel lengthening and pitch excursion marking prominence; Yawarana does not mark prominence in the same way. Even so, in some situations, native speakers do appear to attend to stress (i.e., when correcting the pronunciation of language learners). Here, we ask what the acoustic correlates of prominence are, paying particular attention to intensity, pitch, and duration information. We are examining over 200 lexical items produced by four native speakers. These items are repeated in isolation, produced in carrier phrases, and produced in narratives and conversations. We compare measures of prominence in each of these situations. This investigation will pave the way for a more in-depth study of acoustic features of Yawarana and will inform future studies of prominence in other Cariban languages.

Bridging the Gaps between Digital Humanities, Lexicography, and Linguistics: A TEI Dictionary for the Documentation of Mixtepec-Mixtec

This paper discusses the digital dictionary component in an ongoing language documentation project for the Mixtepec-Mixtec language (iso 639-3: mix). Mixtepec-Mixtec (Sa’an Savi ‘rain language’) is an Otomonguean language spoken by roughly 9,000–10,000 people in the Juxtlahuaca district of Oaxaca and in parts of the Guerrero and Puebla states of Mexico. Creating a digital dictionary for an under-resourced language entails a number of challenges that require unique and nuanced encoding solutions in which a delicate balance between the linguistic content, data structure, potential linked resources, and editorial metadata must be found. Herein we demonstrate how we use TEI to create a reusable, extensible, and machine readable language resource with an emphasis on how our solutions using a combination of novel and established TEI dictionary structures enable us to address our specific needs for Mixtepec-Mixtec and also provide a relevant roadmap for similar under-resourced language projects.

Documentação linguística das zonas raianas de Portugal e Espanha: o projeto Frontespo, com análise do caso da Beira Baixa / Extremadura espanhola

This paper takes on two main objectives. The first is to present and depict the project Frontespo – Frontera hispano-portuguesa: documentación lingüística y bibliográfica [Spanish-Portuguese frontier: linguistic and bibliographic documentation], which aims at producing a comprehensive linguistic documentation of the frontier area between Portugal and Spain. The second objective is to study the stressed vowel systems of a specific border area located in the central interior part of Portugal, which, despite not having been subject to a detailed depiction up to this day, is decisive in understanding the constitution of Portuguese central-southern dialects as a whole, as recent studies have shown. The results are clear in (i) allowing for the description of the area’s vowel systems and (ii) improving our view on the history of central-southern Portuguese. This study therefore exemplifies the type of linguistic approach that a project like Frontespo allows for and, more importantly, the need for new, comprehensive language documentation projects in Portugal.

Nenek: a cloud-based collaboration platform for the management of Amerindian language resources

This article presents Nenek: A cloud-based collaboration platform for language documentation of underresourced languages. Nenek is based on a crowdsourcing scheme that supports native speakers, indigenous associations, government agencies and researchers in the creation of virtual communities of minority language speakers on the Internet. Nenek includes a set of web tools that enables users to work collaboratively on language documentation tasks, build lexicographic assets and produce new language resources. This platform includes a three-stage management model to control the acquisition of existent language resources, the manufacturing of new resources, as well as their distribution within the virtual community and to the general public. In the acquisition stage, existent language resources are either automatically extracted from the web by a crawler or received through donations from users who participate in a monolingual social network. In the manufacturing stage, lexicographic and collaborative tools enable users to build new resources while the acquired and manufactured resources are published in the diffusion stage, either within the virtual community or publicly. We present a life cycle mapping scheme that registers the transformations of the language resources at each of the three stages of language resource management. This scheme also traces the utilization and diffusion of each resource produced by the virtual community. The paper includes a case study in which we present the use of the Nenek platform in a language documentation project of a Mayan language spoken in Mexico's Gulf coast region called Huastec. This case study reveals Nenek's efficiency in terms of acquisition, annotation, manufacturing and diffusion of language resources; it also discusses the participation of the members of the virtual community.

Utilizing Language Technology in the Documentation of Endangered Uralic Languages

The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which record new spoken language data, digitize available recordings and annotate these multimedia data in order to provide comprehensive language corpora as databases for future research on and for endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Specifically, we describe a script providing interactivity between different morphosyntactic analysis modules implemented as Finite State Transducers and ELAN, a Graphical User Interface tool for annotating and presenting multimodal corpora. Ultimately, the spoken corpora created in our projects will be useful for scientifically significant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future.

The Persistence of Language: Constructing and Confronting the Past and Present in the Voices of Jane H. Hill. Edited by Shannon T. Bischoff, Deborah Cole, Amy V. Fountain, and Mizuki Miyashita. Culture and Language Use, no. 8. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. xxx + 440. $133.00.

<i>The Persistence of Language: Constructing and Confronting the Past and Present in the Voices of Jane H. Hill</i>. Edited by Shannon T. Bischoff, Deborah Cole, Amy V. Fountain, and Mizuki Miyashita. Culture and Language Use, no. 8. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. xxx + 440. $133.00.

Language Documentation meets Language Technology

Thepaper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which use similar data and technical frameworks and are carried out collaboratively in Uppsala, Tromso, Syktyvkar and Freiburg. Our projects record and annotate spoken language data in order to provide comprehensive speech corpora as databases for future research on and for these endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Ultimately, the multimodal corpora created by our projects will be useful for scientifically significant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future.

Language documentation and division: Bridging the digital divide

<p id="d1e57">Contemporary language documentation workflow is a largely digital process. While this has had many benefits for how linguists undertake language documentation projects, it has also lead to a disparity between how the process is conceptualised by academic researchers, and how it is conceptualised by the speakers of endangered languages. In this paper I discuss the nature of this disparity, and illustrate this with my own experience of working with speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages in Nepal. In my own research I have incorporated ongoing discussion regarding digital methods into my working relationships with participants, but other researchers have made digital training a specific feature of their research methodology. I discuss two projects that provide positive models for this kind of digital gap bridging. The first is the Iltyem-iltyem sign website and the second is the Aikuma language documentation phone application. After discussion of these positive developments in digital outreach I discuss some of the challenges that we still face in ensuring that what we do is engaging and relevant for the communities we work with. This discussion is not only relevant for language documentation researchers, but for all who work in the digital humanities, as we need to be more aware of the different needs and levels of digital education of different communities. <p id="d1e59"> L'acheminement du travail de documentation des langues contemporaines est en grande partie un processus numérique. Bien que cela a représenté de nombreux avantages en ce qui concerne la façon dont les linguistes entreprennent les projets de documentation des langues, cela a aussi entraîné une inégalité entre notre compréhension du processus de documentation et la compréhension des locuteurs de langues menacées. Dans cet article, je discute de la nature de cette inégalité, et j'illustre ceci par ma propre expérience de travail avec des locuteurs des langues tibéto-burmanes au Népal. Dans mes propres recherches, j'ai intégré une discussion continue au sujet des méthodes numériques dans mes relations de travail avec les participants, mais pour d'autres chercheurs, la formation numérique est une caractéristique précise de leur méthodologie de recherche. Je discute de deux projets qui offrent un modèle positif afin de combler ces lacunes numériques. Le premier est le site Web des signes Iltyem-iltyem et le deuxième est l'application de téléphonie de documentation du langage Aikuma. Après avoir discuté de ces développements positifs en matière de diffusion numérique, je discute de certains des défis auxquels nous sommes encore confrontés pour nous assurer que ce que nous faisons est stimulant et pertinent pour les collectivités avec lesquelles nous travaillons. Cette discussion est non seulement pertinente pour les chercheurs en documentation des langues, mais pour toutes les personnes qui travaillent dans le domaine des sciences humaines numériques, car nous devons être plus conscients des différents besoins et niveaux en matière d'éducation numérique des collectivités avec lesquelles nous travaillons.

Immediate before the verb focus position in Nsong (Bantu B85d, DR Congo)

Nsong is a western Bantu language spoken in the neighbourhood of Kikwit (5°2'28"S 18°48'58"E, Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, DRC) and encoded as B85d in the New Updated Guthrie List (Maho 2009). To this B80 or Tiene-Yanzi group also belongs Mbuun, encoded as B87 by Guthrie (1971: 39) and spoken in the wider vicinity of Idiofa (4°57'35"S 19°35'40", Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Both languages are closely related. They share a high percentage of fundamental and other vocabulary as well as several rather atypical phonological innovations (Bostoen &amp; Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa &amp; Bostoen 2012). Preliminary elicitation-based research on Mbuun has pointed out that the pre-verbal domain plays a crucial role in the marking of argument focus in Mbuun (Bostoen &amp; Mundeke 2011, 2012). In this paper, we assess whether this is also the case in Nsong on the basis of a text corpus which the first author has been collecting, transcribing and annotating in 2013 and 2014 as part of an endangered language documentation project funded by the DoBeS program of the Volkswagen Foundation through a 3-year grant (2012-2015). More information on the project can be found on http://www.kwilubantu.ugent.be/. This Nsong text corpus exclusively consists of oral discourse and currently counts 48.022 tokens and 11.973 types. The team’s 2013 fieldwork aimed at documenting Nsong speech events in as many different cultural settings as possible. As a result, the corpus comprises different text genres, such as political speeches, historical traditions, folk music, tales, proverbs, hunting language, ceremonial language used during circumcision and twin rites, and popular biological knowledge. In line with previous research on Mbuun, we concentrate here on mono-clausal argument focus constructions, even if preliminary research has pointed out that bi-clausal focus structures are more common in the Nsong corpus.&#x0D;