We are delighted to announce that two projects from MIT Linguistics have been selected for funding under the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) initiative, a new program in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences:
- Elise Newman and Norvin Richards have received funding for a project entitled “Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey Research, Revitalization and Documentation” (PWRRD, pronounced “powered”):
PWRRD is the union of two facets of linguistic research conducted at MIT: theoretical advancement and the revitalization of indigenous languages. PWRRD brings these two threads together by assembling a coalition of Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey speakers and MIT linguistics students, postdocs, and faculty to document, model, and ultimately revitalize the Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey language. Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey is critically endangered, with an aging speaker population. To increase access to language instruction among the Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey community, we will use the results of our research to build an online language learning tool in collaboration with teachers and learners of the language.
- Donca Steriade has received funding for the project “Tucăture: A Living Laboratory for Kirundi Language Preservation and Linguistic Discovery”
We plan to develop a tool that helps speakers of Kirundi, the national language of Burundi, improve their tonal literacy levels, while also contributing to Kirundi’s linguistic analysis. Kirundi is a tonal language. Kirundi speakers are literate, but tonal literacy is low. Most texts omit tone marks entirely, creating extensive ambiguity. We address this challenge in two ways. One component evaluates if existing tone marks are suboptimal and, if so, proposes changes. Another component is a mobile application that improves tone-marking proficiency among Kirundi speakers through interactive drills to strengthen the association between tone marks, possibly revised, and tones.
https://shass.mit.edu/mit-human-insight-collaborative-announces-funding-awards-for-25-projects/
https://mithic.mit.edu/humanities-cultivation-fund-projects/