Field Project Report 1 for Ling 600.01 Phonetic Theory
Report due by the beginning of class on Thursday of Week 2.
This report should be no more than a page, introducing the language and describing your consultant's language background, plus no more than another page for the appendix. For the main part of the report, consult the sources listed above under Section 2 ("Finding information about a language") in the Course Project and Lab Assignments document to find out the answers to the following questions:
(1) Where is the language spoken and how many people speak the language? Is it an "endangered language", or widely distributed, with many regional varieties? Is it a written language, and if so, is writing a fairly recent innovation or is there a long enough history of writing that there might be a contrast between literary and colloquial varieties?
(2) What is the historical relationship of the language with other languages? That is, what is its "family tree" and/or important "Sprachbund" neighbors? What is the current language contact situation? Are speakers of the language generally monolingual, or are they bilingual or trilingual? If the latter, what is the other language (or languages) that speakers command?
From your consultant, find out such relevant information as the answers to the following:
(3) Where did he or she grow up? Did this background provide a relatively homogeneous dialect background, or did it insure that your consultant has good command of several varieties of the language? Is your consultant literate in the target language, or does he or she use it only at home and among friends?
(4) What other languages does he or she speak? At what age and where were these languages learned?
The appendix is the final report from Lab 2 on the evidence that you gathered regarding the length of your vocal tract and the length of the language consultant's vocal tract.