With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Elena Indjieva will study intonational variation in the two dialects of Oirat: Kalmyk, spoken in Russia, and Xinjiang Oirat, spoken in China. Utterances produced by native speakers of the two dialects will be recorded, and a computer program used to make acoustic measurements. The main product of this project will be an annotation system designed for the description of the prosodic structure and inventory of tones.
This dissertation project will contribute to the documentation of an endangered language, and the data will be a valuable addition to the relatively new field of intonational typology, which examines the intonation of typologically diverse languages. Oirat is an agglutinating language with vowel harmony, a type whose intonational properties have been poorly studied. There is also a growing interest in documenting intonational variation within dialects of a language, as cross-dialectal analysis can greatly contribute to an understanding of the functions of different components of prosody and expand our knowledge in the field of linguistic encoding. Comparing Kalmyk and Xinjiang Oirat may lead to valuable insights regarding the influence of a contact language on the prosody of another language. Finally, this research project may promote cultural reconnection between the Kalmyk and Xinjiang Oirat peoples, leading to mutually beneficial collaboration between the two communities.
