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
- Dena'ina
- Language 3
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!
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.
Language 3
Overview
- Speakers:
- Language Status:
- Orthography:
- ISO 639:
Morphological Typology of Language 3
Resources for Language 3
Here are the available resources I could find for Language 3:
