Living Tongues Institute is the recipient of grants from the NEH and NSF
We are pleased to announce that we have been awarded two upcoming grants to further our research on Munda languages. The source of funding is the Dynamic Language Infrastructure (DLI) / Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) grants that are a result of a partnership between two US government agencies: the NEH and the NSF.
2022-2024: Documentation and analysis of seven Munda languages and development of the Munda Virtual Archive. National Endowment for the Humanities Grant Award # PD-281083-21.
The documentation through data collection and analysis, and development of grammars, for seven endangered Munda languages, spoken in northeast India and Bangladesh. All data would be made available online through the Munda Virtual Archive and would be archived at the Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage (RWAAI) at Lund University, Sweden.
This project proposes comprehensive documentation of seven Munda languages – Gorum, Gta’, Juang, Kharia, Mundari, Remo, and Santali – spoken in northeast India and Bangladesh. Munda languages constitute the westernmost, and typologically most divergent, subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. There are at least twelve Munda languages, spoken in the area of northern India and Bangladesh, ranging in speaker population from those with a few million speakers (Santali) to those with under 10,000 (most languages of southern Odisha). The structures of Munda languages make them very distinct from their sister languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia. Contemporary researchers of the Munda language family acknowledge that we have an incomplete picture of even the basic analytic units of the prosodic and phonological systems of even some of the best documented Munda languages. Even today, the quality of the data available to base generalizations upon is lacking for most Munda languages. Besides providing a fundamental and systematic documentation of these seriously endangered languages, we will use the data we gather to advance typological and historical research on the Munda and Austroasiatic language families. We will develop the Munda Virtual Archive, which will offer access to comparative linguistic data on the seven targeted languages. Data would be archived at the Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Indigenous Heritage (RWAAI) at the University of Lund, Sweden.
2021-2026: Words, phrases, and sentences at the interface of phonology and morphosyntax. National Science Foundation Grant Award #2041248.
This project is designed to determine how the basic linguistic units of language such as word, phrase, sentence can be characterized in terms of sound patterns and phenomena such as intonation or stress placement. Preliminary investigations have revealed significant mismatches between the combinatorial patterns of parts of words, i.e., what defines morphological or grammatical words, and the prosodic or phonological patterns and phenomena that are associated with such strings. This project identifies sets of prosodic and phonological features, the processes that define their domains, and how these do (or do not) interface with grammatical (morphosyntactic) and syntactic structures, as well as the role of intonation in marking focus in words, phrases, and sentences. We can then confidently hypothesize what the characteristic phonological properties of words, phrases, sentences (or any other unit) are and how these are integrated. The findings form the basis of a large searchable database serving as a resource to facilitate significant cross-linguistic comparison that opens new prospects for examining the phonology-morphosyntax interface. This project offers major opportunities for primary research in science by speakers of minority languages who are vastly underrepresented communities of scientists and thus this activity helps decolonize linguistics as a discipline.
The research analyzes how basic units like word, phrase or sentence are defined phono-prosodically (distribution of sound co-occurrences and alternations, intonational patterns, etc.), based on quantitatively valid samples supported by instrumental acoustic data and incorporating potential phonetic variation across different demographic subgroups of speakers (male vs. female, young vs. middle aged vs. elderly, speakers of different regional varieties, actively bilingual speakers or not, speakers of endangered languages vs. speakers of healthy languages, etc). The project sets the foundation for modeling the various processes of change that may have operated at different historical periods or which may be currently ongoing, whether these are due to language contact or not, thus significantly advancing typological linguistics and contact linguistics. In addition to producing the comprehensive, searchable online database, research findings are to be disseminated through publications on individual languages as well as in comparative studies.