Chuvash and Linguistic Documentation (original) (raw)

Chuvash Language in Chuvashia’s Instruction System: An Example of Educational Language Policies in Post-Soviet Russia

Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 13(4), pp. 52–84., 2014

This article presents the situation of the Chuvash language in the education system of the Republic of Chuvashia and its evolution since the end of the Soviet period. The analysis relies on several sources: governmental statistics, observations on the ground, interviews with teachers and school officers, and a socio-linguistic survey among secondary and upper secondary school students. The data show that most of the gains for Chuvash, achieved by the language policies in education in the early 1990s, had already been neutralized 10 years later. Since the mid-2000s Chuvash-language instruction has steadily decreased, and seems to have lost the weak support it had from the Chuvash authorities. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, Chuvash has been declared compulsory in the districts where it was an optional subject, although the teaching of Chuvash, especially as a state language of the republic, is clearly inefficient. The conclusion is that it is not the letter of Russia’s education reforms in Putin’s era that is crucial in this case, but the spirit. A republic such as Chuvashia, which is dependent on Moscow’s subsidies, does not seem able or even willing to counteract the state-promoted language ideology.

Linguistic features of communication in Ukrainian

Eduweb

The establishment of the language in the country should occur under conditions providing relevant linguistic support for this process, as well as proper legal support, for which unique instructional techniques for communication should be used. In Ukraine, in-depth contrastive studies of contact languages are used to successfully implement this process. Contrastive vocabulary dictionaries are created. Interpretive and translation dictionaries are being improved, including both general language and specialized ones. Along with this, special dictionaries are also being expanded due to units illustrating the grammatical properties of the Ukrainian language. The purpose of the academic paper is to systematize information regarding studying issues in the scientific literature related to the linguistic features of the communication process in the Ukrainian language, as well as to clarify their most significant practical aspects. Analytical-bibliographical, systemic-structural, comparative,...

(2014) Collaborative Language Documentation: the Construction of the Huastec Corpus

Proceedings CCURL 2014. Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages in the Linked Open Data Era. Workshop in the 9th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2014), p.67-70, 2014

In this paper, we describe the design and functioning of a web-based platform called Nenek, which aims to be an on-going language documentation project for the Huastec language. In Nenek, speakers, linguistic associations, government instances and researchers work together to construct a centralized repository of materials about the Huastec language. Nenek not only organizes different types of contents in repositories, it also uses this information to create online tools such as a searchable database with documents on Huastec language and culture, E-dictionaries and spell checkers. Nenek is also a monolingual social network in which users discuss contents on the platform. Until now, the speakers have created a monolingual E-dictionary and we have initiated an on-going process of the construction of a repository of written texts in the Huastec language. In this context, we have been able to localize and digitally archive documents in other formats (audios, videos, images), yet the retrieval, creation, storage, and documentation of this type of materials is still in a preliminary phase. In this presentation, we want to present the general methodology of the project.

on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2. London: SOAS. or

2015

© 2009 The Authors No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, on any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author(s) of that part of the publication, except as permitted by UK copyright law. ISBN: 978-0-7286-0392-9 Printed in the United Kingdom Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project

Language documentation meets language technology

The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which use similar data and technical frameworks and are carried out collaboratively in Uppsala, Tromsø, Syktyvkar and Freiburg. Our projects record and annotate spoken language data in order to provide comprehensive speech corpora as databases for future research on and for these endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Ultimately, the multimodal corpora created by our projects will be useful for scientifically significant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future.

(2018) Hamburg Corpora for Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages

Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology, 2018

The long-term INEL project (2016–2033), carried out at the University of Hamburg, aims to develop digital linguistic corpora and supporting infrastructure for a number of selected languages of Northern Eurasia. At present, corpora of Selkup, Kamas and Dolgan are being created. The project builds upon existing materials from various archive sources, including the Selkup archive of Angelina I. Kuzmina preserved at the University of Hamburg, Kamas audio recordings from the archives in Tartu and Helsinki, and Dolgan recordings provided by the House of the Cultures of Taimyr Peninsula. All the texts in the corpora are provided with a phonological transcription, morphological interlinear glossing, free translations; selected subsets also bear additional annotations for semantic and syntactic features, information status of referents, borrowings and code-switching. The corpora are intended for typologically aware grammatical research but may also be of interest for a wider audience. A number of satellite information resources are also being developed, contributing towards a more efficient research infrastructure.