| NSF Org: |
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | June 21, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 9, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 1563129 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Mary Paster
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2022 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $165,574.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $201,461.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2017 = $15,006.00 FY 2018 = $9,999.00 FY 2019 = $10,882.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3112 LEE BUILDING COLLEGE PARK MD US 20742-5100 (301)405-6269 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
3112 Lee Building College Park MD US 20742-5103 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): |
International Research Collab, DEL |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
Language contact situations arise when at least two languages or varieties interact. Linguists know that there are a wide variety of outcomes that occur in these situations. For example, sometimes only a few words are borrowed, or perhaps entirely new languages emerge, or speakers use both languages and switch and mix between them in systematic, patterned ways. There are significant gaps in existing knowledge about language contact situations, and those gaps are even larger when considering contact situations involving two or more endangered languages. Endangered language contact raises questions on language 'vitality,' that is, who, how and where the languages are in use. Even more understudied is child language acquisition in such contact situations. This project will document the language usage by children and adults in a region where endangered languages are in contact. Broader impacts include providing graduate students with international research and training opportunities and fostering a new international collaboration between U.S. and foreign academic institutions. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing support for international activities associated with this project.
With more than 30 Mayan languages are spoken by about 3 million people in an area of 345,937 square kilometers, many of these languages are in contact, resulting in multilingual speakers. Although documentation projects have been carried out on several Mayan languages, their interaction under contact has not been studied extensively. Understanding the principles of contact-induced change will allow language scientists to better document these languages and to make suggestions concerning their maintenance. The team will focus on Awakateko and K'iche', two endangered Mayan languages from the Huehuetenango region of western Guatemala. This project will investigate the following main questions: How do children acquiring one or both of these languages use them, and what determines which language is more dominant? What are the patterns of everyday use of Awakateko and K'iche' by adult speakers in this area? What factors determine the relative importance of one of the languages? Led by University of Maryland linguist Maria Polinsky, the collaboration includes two U.S.-trained linguists, Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro and Dr. Ajb'ee Jiménez Sánchez, both of whom are native speakers of Mayan languages and are also experienced in linguistic fieldwork on their own and other Mayan languages. The team is uniquely positioned to carry out this investigation, given their collective expertise on heritage languages, syntactic theory, Mayan languages, language contact, and child language acquisition. The project will focus on a set of phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena: stress; palatalization; numeral classifiers and detransitivization means (i.e., antipassive and agent focus). In addition, the project will construct a transcribed, annotated corpus of naturally occurring data (narratives and dialogues) with bilingual and multilingual speakers which will be accessible to other researchers and the general public. The project has a strong training component that will engage native speakers of both languages, and these trained native-speaker citizen scientists will play the primary role in data collection.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
More than 30 Mayan languages are spoken by about 3 million people in an area of 133,567 square miles spanning from Mexico to Honduras. Many of these languages are in contact with each other, resulting in a large number of speakers who are multilingual, speaking distinct languages from the Mayan family. Although linguistic documentation projects have been carried out for several of these languages at an individual level, their interaction under contact has not been studied extensively, primarily because researchers have long focused on their interaction with Spanish, which is a socially prestigious language across the region. Understanding how Mayan languages interact in a multilingual society is of utmost importance for language scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, educators, and political scientists, and our project aimed to advance our knowledge in this regard.
For linguists, the study of Mayan language contact opens a window into the interaction between two or more closely related languages, whose pronunciation and words are relatively similar. In our study, we examined changes in the production and perception of palatal sounds, changes in how tense is expressed in sentences, and changes in the production of reduced sentences (also called elliptical structures). These phenomena were studied both with children and adults, and we have created a corpus of child speech and child-directed speech by adults in Awakateko and K’iche’. In addition to sharpening and modifying the existing linguistic analyses of these phenomena, we were able to determine that language interaction under contact often relies on the “good enough” strategy, where a language form or structure emerging under contact is not identical to its source in the baseline.
Beyond linguistics, our work has a direct bearing on the documentation and maintenance of minoritized languages. The defining characteristic of minoritization is the existence of a power imbalance between one language and another, societally-dominant language (in this case, Spanish). Mayan languages are mostly excluded from use in government and formal education and are considered less important than Spanish. As a consequence of such factors (among others), speakers of these languages are prone to experience uncertainty, shame, or ambivalence about using their languages and transmitting them to the next generations. In our project, we trained native-speaker scientists in data collection and analysis; moreover, they served as a liaison between the local communities and the project team. By including native speakers of several Mayan languages in our project, we have contributed to the valorization of these languages and their speakers, have enhanced their prestige, have given the relevant communities a sense of ownership and pride in their indigenous heritage, and have provided the necessary tools for future work.
The main deliverables from this project include recordings of child and child-directed speech in Awakateko and K’iche’, which are freely available to researchers worldwide; small corpora of oral histories; training materials for Mayan speaker-linguists; several research articles, multiple presentations in the USA, in Western Europa, and in Guatemala (in Spanish), and three doctoral dissertations.
Last Modified: 05/15/2023
Modified by: Maria Polinsky
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
