9319705 Ladefoged ABSTRACT The survival of many languages is endangered as the speakers die out or are absorbed into larger communities. Soon we will no longer know what these languages sounded like, or what articulatory gestures their speakers used. Their disappearance will result in permanent loss of data for future linguistic investigations. Following a pattern established during previous research we will investigate endangered languages that are important from the linguistic point of view. Another major aspect of this project is that it provides standardized descriptions in quantified form using a set of basic phonetic measures, designed to characterize both specific and universal phonetic features. Fieldwork will be conducted in response to invitations from linguists already working on appropriate languages. In many cases such linguists lack sufficient phonetic expertise or field experiences to do the job alone, but are eager to cooperate in producing a good phonetic description. The principal phonetic and phonological patterns will be identified and illustrated in specially prepared material, along with supplementary material illustrating coarticulatory and other phonetic phenomena. We will make both audio and physiological recordings including aerodynamic records for airstream mechanisms and the timing of articulatory gestures, and palatographic records for articulatory contacts. Audio recordings will be analyzed in the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory. Fully illustrated and documented accounts of each language will be published so that the knowledge of the sounds and articulatory gestures involved in these endangered languages will remain available for future researchers and can form part of the input to the formulation of theories of phonetic and phonological universals. ***
