User:Jdrisco1/Language selection
User:Jdrisco1 Language Selection
Partner
I would love to work with someone who has some sort of background in computers!
Languages, in order of preference
- Rungus
- Kaluli
- Dena'ina
Rungus
Rungus is an Austronesian language and a variety of Momogun.
- Speakers: The Rungus people, around 60,000 as of 2010, including 10,000 monolinguals. The Rungus are located in Sabah, Malaysia.
- Language Status: "threatened," with extremely low digital support.
- Orthography: Latin script
- ISO 639: drg
Rungus is my first choice because my cat's name is also Rungus! I learned about the language after naming my cat, of course. She (my cat) is on campus and can help with the project.
Morphological Typology of Rungus
Appears to be primarily inflectional: a grammar I found shows that tenses and other words are formed with affixation, whether that be prefixes, infixes, or suffixes. I was under the impression that Austronesian languages tend to be further on the agglutinative side of things, so it's very possible that there is some agglutination happening as well.
Resources for Rungus
Here are the available resources I could find for Rungus:
- Ethnologue page
- Wikipedia page for Momogun, its autonym
- Rungus dictionary
- Compiled list of more resources for Rungus
- Glottolog page
- Spoke with Jonathan who said there is a grammar that we can try to get through ILL.
I think it's quite likely to find a few pages of Rungus. I haven't extensively gone through the list of resources, but there seems to be quite a bit to work with!
Kaluli
Kaluli is a Trans-New Guinean/Bosavi language with four dialects, though dialectal differences are not huge.
- Speakers: The Kaluli people, about 5,100 as of 2018. The Kaluli are located in the Southern Highlands and Western provinces of Papua New Guinea.
- Language Status: "Educational." Kaluli is regarded as a developing and thriving language that is being taught in primary schools. That said, it has almost no digital support.
- Orthography: Latin script.
- ISO 639: bco
I would be excited to work on Kaluli because they were the people I studied in my first ever cultural anthropology class in 9th grade, which is what ended up inspiring me to enter linguistics in college. I even wrote and illustrated a children's book about cultural relativism and the Kaluli as my final project for that class! It would be super cool to now work on a transducer for their language.
Morphological Typology of Kaluli
From the sources I can access right now, there isn't much information on its typology. I would go ahead and guess that it is at least semi-inflectional, since it uses affixation for tense marking and other things. It is an egophoric language (meaning that it is marked in the grammar whether one is personally involved in an event or not) and uses SOV.
Resources for Kaluli
Here are the available resources I could find for Kaluli:
- Ethnologue page
- Wikipedia page
- Glottolog page
- Paper on Kaluli language and culture
- Compilation of other resources
- I can't access a few of these, but I can see there is a grammar and a dictionary, which is a great start. Would probably need to use ILL.
I'm not quite sure how feasible it would be to get a few pages of written Kaluli, but I will keep poking around.
Dena'ina
Dena'ina is an Athabaskan language with four varieties. It is an official language of Alaska, and one of seven Athabaskan languages that is phonemically non-tonal.
- Speakers: Of the Dena'ina population, which is around 1,000, only about 50 speakers remain. The Dena'ina are located in the Cook Inlet region of Alaska.
- Language Status: Moribund ("at the point of death"). This means it is critically endangered/almost extinct. This project might thus feel more like language preservation.
- Orthography: Latin script, Dena'ina alphabet. But, a Dena'ina artist created a custom alphabet for the language as well.
- ISO 639-3: tfn
Dena'ina interests me because last summer I worked on Hän, which is also a Na-Dene/Athabaskan language of an indigenous people in Alaska. Athabaskan languages are infamously confusing to linguists, but since that is the language family I have experience with, it would be cool to find similarities and differences between the two languages.
Morphological Typology of Dena'ina
Agglutinative, polysynthetic language. One word can mean an entire English sentence. There is some inflectional morphology when it comes to aspect in the form of affixation.
Resources for Dena'ina
Here are the available resources I could find for Dena'ina:
- Wikipedia page
- Glottolog page
- Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) page
- Introductory grammar for the Kenai (Outer Inlet) Dialect
- Basic lexicon
There is a phrasebook listed on the Wikipedia page, but the link is broken. That said, it seems pretty plausible to find a couple of pages of writing.
