tool name

Wednesday, Jul. 30, 2008

UK linguists, Shughni scholars work to save spoken language

Imagine a world in which your native language is spoken by a population about one-fifth the size of Lexington.

Imagine, also, that your language is not taught in schools, broadcast over the airwaves or preserved in literature. And one by one, the words of your language are being replaced by the words of a more dominant language in the region.

Such is the predicament for the Shughni people, who speak a minority language in the Pamir Mountains of eastern Tajikistan.

But thanks to a team of linguists at the University of Kentucky, the Shughni language has a better chance for long-term survival. The UK researchers, under the direction of linguistics professor Greg Stump, are hosting three Shughni-speaking scholars from Tajikistan this month for a series of workshops dedicated to the study of the language.

The workshops are the first step toward creating not only a written script for Shughni, but also a full-length grammar of the language for others to study.

“At present, no such grammar exists,” said Stump.

If the project continues to receive funding in future years, the Shughni language will be safely preserved in linguistics databases, and the Shughni people will have a script that allows them to write in their own language.

Though Shughni still has tens of thousands of speakers, this scarcely documented language faces challenges from bigger languages like Tajik, the country’s official language. Because Shughni is not the official language, it is rarely broadcast on radio or television. As an entirely oral language with no script or alphabet, its stability is in question.

“This language is somewhat endangered,” said Stump. “It’s an unwritten language spoken in a country where, basically, government, education, commerce and media all depend on a different language.”

Under normal circumstances, linguists studying an underdocumented language would spend countless hours in the field, analyzing people’s sentences to determine grammatical patterns. But because the Shughni speakers are already language scholars, the UK research project is proceeding at an accelerated pace.

“We can ask these native speakers what their analysis is of the grammatical features that we’re talking about,” said Stump. “That is going to make this an extremely exciting and truly collaborative effort.”

With funding from the UK College of Arts and Sciences, the English department and the linguistics program, the workshops are being held in the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, on the third floor of the William T. Young Library. In addition to Stump, UK linguistics professors Andrew Hippisley, Mark Lauersdorf and Jean Marie Rouhier-Willoughby also lend their expertise to the project. Student researchers James Mastin, Dustin Zerrer and Amanda Barie, who is writing her master’s thesis on Shughni syntax, make sure the workshop sessions are recorded and archived.

Although the Tajikistan government has funded certain scientific studies of the Shughni language in the past, much more preservation work needs to be done. When the opportunity arose to work with the UK team, the Shughni scholars were elated.

“There’s a great amount of knowledge among the linguists involved,” Shughni scholar Muqbilsho Alamshoev said through an interpreter. Alamshoev teaches language classes at Khorog State University, near the Afghanistan border, and directs the Department of Pamir Languages at the Institute for Humanities at Tajikistan’s Academy of Sciences.

Although some Shughni speakers live in Afghanistan, most live in the Pamir region of Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet satellite states. Considering Tajikistan’s reputation for isolation and poverty, Westerners might be surprised to learn that Shughni speakers are, in general, multilingual: They learn Tajik and Russian while in school.

This fact might lead a non-linguist to ask: If most Shughni speakers can also speak a popular language like Russian, why is it necessary to preserve Shughni?