Published: Nov. 15, 2019

ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ Linguistics 2017 PhD graduate Sam Beer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, has received a grant from the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) intended to develop and advance knowledge concerning endangered human languages. In his project, Dr. Beer will digitize, annotate, and analyze legacy recordings of two endangered Kuliak languages of northeastern Uganda, Nyang'i and Soo. He will also conduct new fieldwork with current speakers. Dr. Beer will digitize or scan 25-30 hours of old audio recordings and 3,000-5,000 pages of old field notes on Soo and Nyang'i. He will transcribe/translate/annotate a subset (with transcriptions/broad translation for everything, and annotation for a subset), in order to develop perspectives on language change, language death, the evolution of the field of linguistics, and how talk captured on the fly becomes linguistic data.