Microdiachrony in endangered languages across modalities (MICRODIAC(H)RO)

Documentation, description and analysis of minority and endangered languages have experienced a significant surge in the past few decades and have become a generally accepted target in the broader field of linguistics. In light of the threats of disappearance of such small languages, many efforts focus on documenting them and describing their grammars and lexicons. In some cases, when the conditions of the language community allow for it, the results of such processes are used as the basis for language revitalization programs. Given the rates of language disappearance, every possible effort to counter it is of vital importance. The possibilities offered by digital technologies to support language documentation and revitalization are not fully exploited yet, but start to have an impact on the way this type of research is carried out, as well as on accessibility of results for the scientific community and crucially for the language communities themselves as well.

This project focuses on two endangered languages in different modalities: Catalan Sign Language (LSC, Catalonia) and Griko (Italiot- Greek variety of Salento, Southern Italy). Change in morphosyntactic properties within such languages has received very little attention so far. This project will make a novel contribution to fill this gap in research from a cross-modal perspective on two fronts: (a) exploring how diachronic change in a relatively small time span can be detected, described and accounted for (microdiachrony), and (b) creating research resources in the form of two corpora that include transcribed and annotated data to make the study of grammatical change feasible.

Due to the lack of actual data, the study of diachronic change has remained marginal in the study of deaf-community sign languages, only with some exceptions, and grammatical change is rarely the focus. The current availability of LSC data from different generations of signers opens a window to examine the michrodiacronic dimension of the language. The relatively rich data existing for Griko is scattered across many different types of sources, many of which are in analog format and often difficult to get hold of. This situation makes us speak of a low-resource language, too. The compilation of these data into a corpus will cover a period of slightly over a century, thus offering for the first time a resource to explore language change over such a time span in the most recent phase of Griko. Both during data collection and in subsequent descriptive work, computational methods will be used to accelerate or enhance the process utilizing our collected data.

The factors leading to language change proposed by different approaches to diachronic linguistics will be analyzed, among which we will devote particular attention to internal factors like reanalysis and to external triggers like (a) language transmission and acquisition patterns; (b) language contact, and (c) characteristics of the language community (eventually changing over time). The analysis of results will try to understand the commonalities driving microdiachronic changes in the signed and in the spoken modality, as well as the differences deriving from the modality factor.

The Project is funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades / Agencia Estatal de Investigación, PID2020-119041GB-I00, 2021-2025, and coordinated by Gemma Barberà (UPF) & Josep Quer (ICREA-UPF). The research team includes Mikel Forcada (U. of Alacant), Marika Lekakou (U. of Ioannina, Greece) and Antonios Anastasopoulos (George Mason University, USA).

The contribution of the project to the SDG starts with countering the threat on linguistic diversity by documenting and promoting endangered languages like the two at stake, Griko and Catalan Sign Language (LSC), and thus contributing to the preservation of linguistic and cultural heritage of communities of users. In the case of the Catalan Deaf community, it indirectly promotes inclusive education for signers, by providing detailed knowledge on the language and materials supporting it, which ultimately contributes to their employment, career development and participation in society.