Language selection

In Ling 073, everyone will be applying the topics of the class to an under-resourced language of their choice throughout the semester, and no two students should be working on the same language. Also, ideally, each student should choose a language with at least some interesting morphological processes. Note: If you have a strong desire to work on language that is normally regarded as entirely "isolating", some accommodations may be made, but you should talk with the professor about it immediately.

Languages you may not choose

• No languages supported by Google translate, however poor-quality.
• No languages supported by Apertium. Check the following places:
  • full list of language pairs
  • all stable language modules
  • incubator - includes some language modules not in the above

Note: If you really want, you may select a language in Apertium's incubator, but you will basically be expected to start from scratch for each assignment and ignore what's available from Apertium except to augment your resources later

• No languages supported by Giellatekno.
• You'll need some authentic text (i.e., text produced by native speakers, even if not standardised) in this language, whether from documents found online, an excerpt of published text that you type up, someone's twitter account, or sample sentences from a grammar. See Places to look for corpora for more info.

Random list of languages that might work

• Western Abenaki
• Kalmyk
• Blackfoot
• Kabardian
• Chamorro
• Lakota
• Shor
• Guaraní
• Syriac
• Lingala
• Ndebele
• Nivkh
• Samoan
• Walpiri
• Arrernte

The assignment

By the beginning of the Thursday class during the first week of classes (this semester: 11:20 on 19 January 2016), turn in the following:

• Create a "Language selection" page under your userpage (wikis.swarthmore.edu/ling073/User:student1/Language_selection, replacing student1 with your username).
• List in order of preference three languages you would like to work on this semester. There are some examples given above, but don't limit yourself to those. There are thousands of languages to choose from!
• For each language, determine as best you can with the resources available a morphological typology of the language. E.g., is it primarily isolating, agglutinative, etc., and how do you know? Are there patterns in that language that reflect more than one morphological type?
• Determine basic information about each language. How many speakers are there, where do they live, what other languages might they know, what is the status of the language in terms of its transmission to current and future generations, is there a normative orthography of some sort? What is the orthography like (what script / any interesting features)? Provide ISO codes used for the language, especially three-letter ones. Basically all of this information should be findable on ethnologue and wikipedia (in one language or other), but feel free to use any source that seems reliable (academic papers, census data, etc.). Cite the sources you use.
• Give some estimation of how likely it will be for you to find about a page's worth of text in this language. (If it's not at all likely, you probably should find some other language to work on.)
• Include a category tag for sp17_LanguageSelection and one for the name of each language. You should have four categories on your page, e.g. [[Category:sp17_LanguageSelection]], [[Category:Abkhaz]], and one each for the other two languages.
• Make use of MediaWiki formatting markup. E.g., each language can be a section, data can be formatted as bullet points out in tables, citations should make use of proper macros, etc.
• Note that conflicts of first choice will be resolved by the first person to post their interest in the language by the wiki getting their earlier choice, and the other party getting a subsequent choice.