| PD-281083-21 | Preservation and Access: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation | Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages | Documentation and analysis of seven Munda languages and development of the Munda Virtual Archive | 1/1/2022 - 12/31/2025 | $239,999.00 | Gregory | David Shelton | Anderson | Mark | | Donohue | Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages | Salem | OR | 97302-1902 | USA | 2021 | | Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation | Preservation and Access | 239999 | 0 | 239999 | 0 | The documentation through data collection and analysis, and development of grammars, for seven endangered Munda languages, spoken in northeast India and Bangladesh. All data would be made available online through the Munda Virtual Archive and would be archived at the Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage (RWAAI) at Lund University, Sweden.
(Edited by staff) This project proposes comprehensive documentation of seven Munda languages – Gorum, Gta’, Juang, Kharia, Mundari, Remo, and Santali – spoken in northeast India and Bangladesh. Munda languages constitute the westernmost, and typologically most divergent, subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. There are at least twelve Munda languages, spoken in the area of northern India and Bangladesh, ranging in speaker population from those with a few million speakers (Santali) to those with under 10,000 (most languages of southern Odisha). The structures of Munda languages make them very distinct from their sister languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia. Contemporary researchers of the Munda language family acknowledge that we have an incomplete picture of even the basic analytic units of the prosodic and phonological systems of even some of the best documented Munda languages. Even today, the quality of the data available to base generalizations upon is lacking for most Munda languages. Besides providing a fundamental and systematic documentation of these seriously endangered languages, we will use the data we gather to advance typological and historical research on the Munda and Austroasiatic language families. We will develop the Munda Virtual Archive, which will offer access to comparative linguistic data on the seven targeted languages. Data would be archived at the Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Indigenous Heritage (RWAAI) at the University of Lund, Sweden. |