User:Rgergun1/Language selection

I am open to working with anyone and willing to switch to other languages.

---

1. Lezgian

Lezgian is a language spoken in the Northeast Caucasus: primarily southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan. It belongs to the Nakh-Dagestanian language family and has approximately 800,000 speakers . While schools typically don't teach it, the language seems to have been growing since at least the 1960s and is now gaining electronic resources .

Lezgian appears to be primarily agglutinative, with the best supporting evidence being the 18 grammatical cases for its nouns . Furthermore, nouns can be created with multiple suffixes, which serves as another indicator of agglutinative morphology. However, it is important to note that Lezgian is not purely agglutinative, as seen by the fact that some verbs have both strong and weak cases, and some verbs undergo stem alternations . Thus, the language also possesses irregular elements, resulting in a mixed typological profile. Since inflection rules exist for both verbs and nouns (e.g., tense and case), one can argue that Lezgian has inflectional morphology. It is achieved primarily via different suffixes, occasionally multiple for the same word.

The language has been written in Cyrillic since 1938 . However, it was also written in a modified Arabic script prior to 1928 and in a modified Latin script between 1928 and 1937 . Among the modern characteristic features of the language are doubled consonants (common in other Northeast Caucasian languages) and special symbols/constructs. Notably, the | symbol and the уь symbol (pronounced u‘/[y]).

A book on the grammar of the language exists; it's available at Haverford's Lutnick Library

When searching for text in Lezgian, I came across mentions of the Lezgian translations of The Red List, called "Яру Улуб," "[The] Red Book." While it would be difficult to find the book itself, I've discovered that some sections of Wikipedia are available in Lezgian, which could serve as valuable points of reference. Also, a potentially helpful list of "Literature on the Lesgian Language." Overall, I don't think it would be too difficult to find resources for this language.

2. Carpathian Romani

Carpathian Romani is a group of similar dialects of the Romani language. This group is a part of the Indo-European language family, as well as the Romany macrolanguage. The language has about 150,000 native speakers as of 2011. The language appears to be neither expanding nor contracting, yet digital resources continue to emerge.

Linguistically, Carpathian Romani is similar to the broader Romany macrolanguage, with the major differences being the presence of Eastern European languages and the absence of German influence. Thus, Carpathian Romani appears to be primarily synthetic, as can be seen in its multifaceted inflectional verb and noun morphology: a trait it shares with the broader Romani language. Verbal morphology is predominantly suffix-based, which would suggest that the language is not isolating, and points to its inflection-heavy structure.

While it was rather easy to find the Bible translated into Carpathian Romani, other resources are a little trickier. I found two books: The Dictionary of the Romas of Zakopane, and Slovak Carpathian Romani: Description of the System. However, the issue with those is that they're rather inaccessible online: only physical copies exist at the Princeton University Library and the National Slovak Library. The issue can be partially addressed because there is a Hungarian Romani Periodic Table, a Polish Romani Periodic Table, and various excerpts/analysis pieces of the aforementioned "Slovak Carpathian Romani: Description of the System" exist.

3. Situ language

Situ is a Rgyalrong dialect spoken in Sichuan Province, China. . It has approximately 35-40,000 speakers, and belongs to the Sino-Tibetian language family. . The language is largely stable, and has limited digital resources available .

Situ appears to be primarily synthetic, with the clearest supporting evidence coming from the verbal agreement system, where verbs reference both the agent and the patient . Such a structure of the verb would effectively rule out the possibility of it being an isolating language. Additionally, the various tonal changes present in the language (particularly in the stems) would indicate that the language is not purely agglutinative, since the primary way of manipulation of verbs is usually not via suffixes or prefixes. Thus, Situ still displays inflectional morphology in its own unique way.

Finding large volumes of text remains a relatively challenging task. While finding academic sources requires moderate effort, I struggle to find any native-produced texts. I've been able to find a list of words with their translations into English in Gates' work . Additionally, I believe Shuya Zhang's Thesis on the Situ language would be useful, since it is essentially a comprehensive grammar rulebook of the language. In addition, I found them discussing the Brag-bar dialect of Situ in this video. Overall, with sufficient time and effort, I believe it is possible to find resources for this language, particularly those necessary for our purposes. That said, I do foresee challenges in finding Situ text produced by native speakers.