With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Fengxiang Li and Graham Thurgood will conduct two years of linguistic research on three endangered languages in China: Tsat, an Austronesian language of Hainan Province; Anong, a Tibeto-Burman language of Yunnan Province; and Oroqen, a Tungusic language of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang Province in northeast China. Although these languages are undergoing rapid change because of their close contact with Chinese, they are geographically separated, typologically different, and genetically distinct. Comparison of them is a rare opportunity to study how very different languages change under intense contact, not with a variety of different languages, but with the same language. American scholars will work with Chinese specialists in these languages whose detailed but unpublished records predate the most intense contact and continue to the modern era. The PIs will translate the existing Chinese descriptions, incorporating new material to fill gaps. In collaboration with Chinese linguists, the PIs will then update analyses based on the data collected in summer fieldwork trips. A comprehensive reference grammar for each language will be produced at the end of the project period.
This research is significant for three inter-related areas of linguistics: language change, typology, and history. In terms of language change, the project investigates effects of dialectal variation, patterns of bilingualism, intense contact of three distinct languages with the same superstratum language, and language obsolescence on structural shift. Typological studies are often based on well-known and better studied languages. This project will address that imbalance with typological information about minority languages in China. In all three cases, but especially for Anong and Oroqen, this project will provide more accurate assessment of the genetic affiliations within their respective language families. In addition, this documentation is urgent because the speakers of these languages are beginning to disappear and the Chinese linguists who worked on their earlier stages have begun to retire. Every time another language dies, aspects of culture are lost. For example, thousands of years of the history of a people can only be accessed through study of their language. The project also brings American and Chinese linguists together to save part of their mutual heritage.
