Wakhi is an Iranian language spoken in the Hindu Kush region of Central Asia, including Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and China. Spoken by 30,000 people, Wakhi is classified as endangered by UNESCO. Wakhi indicates agreement with the subject differently depending on causal tense. In the present tense, agreement seems to operate much as in Romance languages, with person and number morphemes suffixed to the verb. Agreement morphemes in the past tense are less straightforward. They are clitics which rarely, if ever, attach to the verbs, and may attach to various constituents in the sentence, including subject and object. Past analyses of these elements have labeled them simply as "mobile pronominal clitics," leaving their nature ambiguous from a theoretical perspective.
Under the direction of Dr. Brent Henderson, Mr. Todd Hughes will conduct primary fieldwork in Wakhi communities of eastern Tajikistan. He will investigate the function of these clitics from the perspective of syntax and discourse. Mr. Hughes will elicit narratives as well as collect translations and grammatical judgements on constructed examples. These will be used to develop an expanded analysis of the clitics under study as they relate to the system as a whole, making their nature more clear. This project builds upon a large body of research focusing on clitics, mostly in Romance and other European languages, adding data and insights from a geographically and genetically different language. These outcomes, combined with ongoing research on the Wakhi in Afghanistan, will allow for studies on dialectical variation.
All data will be digitally recorded, transcribed and annotated by Mr. Hughes. With participant permission, the data will be submitted to the online Endangered Languages Archive, establishing the first permanent audio-visual record of Wakhi available to researchers and the Wakhi community. Wakhi community members will be able to expand nascent revitalization efforts. Funding this project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.
The purpose of this project was two-fold: To create an archivable collection of texts and lexical items, and To analyze, using modern linguistic theory, certain aspects of the Wakhi past tense structure. In this project, the researcher recorded, transcribed, and translated nine narrative texts in Darshai, Tajikistan, a Wakhi village. Of those nine narrative texts, the research created dense metadata for five of them, using FLEx (SIL's Fieldworks Language EXplorer), which creates XML files with the metadata, but also creates a lexicon. These items will be archived with the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), hosted by SOAS, London. Thus, the first purpose of the project was fulfilled. Additionally, the researcher was able to train a language community member to use the same software, so that he could add to it, expanding the depth of the language resources available both to linguists and to the larger community. As to the second purpose, the researcher presented an theoretical analysis that will expand existing arguments for Distributed Morphology, a theory that sees word- and sentence-formation (morphology and syntax, respectively) as closely related, rather than as separate proecesses. The project also offered preliminary data suggesting that there might also be a connection between phrase-level meaning (pragmatics) and morphology and syntax. Ancilary to the main project, several members of the community were excellent musicians, and asked the researcher to record their music. This was done gladly, and with artist permission, will be used by ethnomusicologists for study on musical styles not previously examined.
