Acquiring an Endangered Language: A Corpus of Child-Directed and Child-Produced Tsez

FAIN: FN-50102-12

Ann Gagliardi
President and Fellows of Harvard College (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

This project will produce the first ever corpus of the Tsez language as it is spoken to and produced by children. The documentation will be based on the recording of over fifty hours of caretaker-child interactions. The recordings, transcriptions and associated glosses will be archived in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) and made available to both the Tsez speaking community and worldwide linguistic research community. Building such a corpus will involve collaboration between researchers in the United States and Dagestan, as well as training both members of the Tsez speaking community and American undergraduates to work as assistants. A crucial part of the project will be the involvement of Tsez women in data collection, something that has never been done before. (Edited by staff)