While linguists are aware of how language shift (the process by which a community of speakers changes from one language to another) plays a role in the demise of a language, significant questions remain, including how social and cognitive constraints shape language structure and how cognitive, social, and historical factors interact to result in language shift. A related issue is that what linguists do know comes primarily from Indo-European languages like English or Latin, which restricts the possible data set in two ways: by the linguistic structures these languages lack and by the smaller set of social situations where language shift has occurred. In order to augment the typology of shift situations and linguistic structure, this project will investigate language change through a unique set of field notes and recordings of two endangered languages of northeastern Uganda collected from 1967-1971, and from new fieldwork with the remaining speakers. Because the target languages in this study diverge typologically from much of the existing sample of structural changes as languages cease to be spoken, they offer a control against the possible hypothesis that observed structural similarities across shifting languages are attributable to historically contingent interference rather than a universal markedness hierarchy of particular grammatical structures. Broader impacts of the project include advancing the training of a post-doctoral scholar and creating learning opportunities for undergraduate linguistics students to participate in and contribute to cutting-edge research. The project will ensure the Nyangi and Soo communities also get copies of the materials in this collection, as well as providing access to the broader community of scientific researchers. Finally, the project will promote international collaboration between scholars at American and Ugandan institutions.
The outcomes of situations in which an ancestral language is replaced by a non-European language are poorly understood. In part, analyses of language shift in languages shifting to non-European languages have been hard to come by because such languages often lack documentation from before the time that they started to shift. This means that there is no reference point to compare current linguistic forms to: linguists have ending points for the types of change undergone by languages, but not starting points. This project addresses this problem by making data accessible from Nyangi (nyp) and Soo (teu), two languages that are now being replaced by African languages. The data to be digitized and archived in this project includes approximately 26 hours of audio recordings on cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes and approximately 3,000 pages of hand-written field notes. The resulting collection of digitized recordings will be translated into English and into the language of broader communication used by the Nyangi and Soo. A selection of its contents will be analyzed and richly annotated in consultation with the Soo and Nyangi communities. Analyses of the typological and areal motivations for the changes observed in Soo and Nyang'i in the 50 years since the recordings in this collection were made will be permanently archived in a secure and accessible location, shared and discussed at scholarly conferences, and published in linguistics journals.
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.
