Skip to main content
Skip to main menu Skip to spotlight region Skip to secondary region Skip to UGA region Skip to Tertiary region Skip to Quaternary region Skip to unit footer

Slideshow

Linguistics faculty receive NSF grant

photo of Hale, Renwick, and Langston

Keith Langston, Professor of Linguistics, was recently awarded a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study endangered languages on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia and the Kvarner Bay in the northern Adriatic Sea. The project, supported by the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure–NEH Documenting Endangered Languages program, seeks to document and analyze endangered language varieties in the Istria and Kvarner regions of Croatia and to create a searchable online collection of annotated speech recordings that can be used to study language variation and code-switching practices by multilingual speakers. 

The research team includes UGA Co-Principal Investigators John Hale and Margaret Renwick, both of the department of linguistics, working with other researchers from the US and Croatia. 

The collection will include recordings and annotated transcriptions of interviews with speakers of Romance (Istriot, Istro-Venetian, Istro-Romanian) and Slavic (Čakavian) varieties that have developed in contact with one another over hundreds of years and that are all now threatened by standard Croatian and Italian, which are official languages in this region.

The project will also contribute to the development of tools for the processing and annotation of multilingual data from low-resource varieties, which is a leading-edge area of research in Natural Language Processing. The online corpus will become part of the UGA Corpus Server project, an initiative by Department of Linguistics faculty members Chad Howe, Renwick, and Hale to make large amounts of natural language data available to members of the university community for teaching and research. The Istria-Kvarner corpus will also be available to other researchers outside UGA and to members of the local language communities in Croatia. 

Personnel

Professor and Department Head
Arch Professor in World Languages and Cultures
Associate Professor, Undergraduate Coordinator

Support Linguistics at UGA

Your donations to the Department of Linguistics will support research and travel opportunities for students and faculty and other initiatives to enhance students' education in linguistics. Please consider joining other friends and alumni who have shown their support by making a gift to our fund. We greatly appreciate your contributions to the success of our programs!  

EVERY DOLLAR CONTRIBUTED TO THE DEPARTMENT HAS A DIRECT IMPACT ON OUR STUDENTS AND FACULTY.