Dr. Sadaf Munshi will coordinate the collection of data in Pakistan and India to create a linguistically analysed and searchable archive of annotated texts in Burushaski. Burushaki is not known to be related to any other language in the world and is thus considered a linguistic "isolate". The database will consist of about 15-20 hours of high quality digitized audio and video recordings of Burushaski oral literature in different, significantly threatened, regional varieties, viz., Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin in Pakistan and Srinagar in India. The genres to be included are: traditional folktales and legends, historical accounts, personal narratives, formal speeches, conversations, poems, speaker-to-speaker discussions of data, and metadata. A selection of the materials will be provided with time-aligned transcriptions, multi-tier annotations, morpheme-to-morpheme and free translations into English. Keeping in view the level of literacy and second language proficiency among Burushaski speakers, a version of smaller edited texts will be independently transliterated into Burushaski and translated into Urdu. Transliteration in Burushaski will be done using a modified Perso-Arabic (Nastâliq) script - a popular writing system for many of the languages spoken in the region. The materials will be archived in the following formats: audio in PCM wav, video in MPEG-2, texts downloadable in TXT, Word, and PDF format, ELAN files with translations and sound alignment, and XML (with XSL). Morphosyntactic analyses and lexical files will be maintained using FLEx - Fieldworks Language Explorer.
Since Burushaski is primarily preserved orally and literacy in the first language is practically non-existent, Dr. Munshi intends the text collection to be the springboard for pedagogical materials that will facilitate native language literacy. The pedagogical materials to be included in the Archive are: introduction to alphabet, wordlists, parts of speech, and basic grammar. The documentation materials will be archived at the University of North Texas Digital Collections Library.
