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Highlighting and preserving the Mosetén language and culture

Summary of the impact

Mosetén is an endangered language spoken by approximately 800 indigenous people in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes. Many Mosetén children only learn the majority language, Spanish.

Research at UWE Bristol has resulted in the development of language materials for the Mosetenes, bilingual educators and other stakeholders. It has enabled bilingual education programmes, and inspired a new generation of Mosetén speakers. It has therefore had a direct influence in avoiding linguistic and cultural loss, and has helped the Mosetenes to preserve the intrinsic value of their language and culture, also raising the group's profile in Bolivia and beyond.

Submitting Institution

University of the West of England, Bristol

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Language Studies, Linguistics

Preserving a linguistic heritage: Biak, an endangered Austronesian language

Summary of the impact

Biak (West Papua, Indonesia) is an endangered language with no previously established orthography. Dalrymple and Mofu's ESRC-supported project created the first on-line database of digital audio and video Biak texts with linguistically analysed transcriptions and translations (one of the first ever for an endangered language), making these materials available for future generations and aiding the sustainability of the language. Biak school-children can now use educational materials, including dictionaries, based on project resources. The project also trained local researchers in best practice in language documentation, enabling others to replicate these methods and empowering local communities to save their own endangered languages.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Language Studies, Linguistics

Working with vulnerable deaf communities to support the vitality of endangered rural sign languages

Summary of the impact

The International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS) has led a large consortium conducting the first-ever substantial comparative study on endangered sign languages in small-scale rural communities with long-standing hereditary deafness ("village sign languages"). The global impact of this work is seen primarily in the domain of language endangerment through work with UNESCO, with the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and with the World Federation of the Deaf. This work also leads to improved educational attainment and professional development for the marginalised users of these sign languages, and the promotion of their linguistic rights.

Submitting Institution

University of Central Lancashire

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Language Studies, Linguistics

Shaping the XML technologies used to manage the world's data

Summary of the impact

The success of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been due in large part to the technologies built around it for constraining, querying, styling and otherwise processing XML documents. Research carried out at Edinburgh has been instrumental in the creation and/or design of many of these core XML technologies, including XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude, XQuery and XProc. Edinburgh staff played key roles in bringing these technologies into widespread use in both the private and public sectors through participation in standards development work.

Submitting Institution

University of Edinburgh

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Computation Theory and Mathematics, Computer Software, Information Systems

Khan

Summary of the impact

Professor Geoffrey Khan has worked closely with the communities of Assyrian Christians of the Middle East carrying out research on their spoken language which exists in numerous dialects, many of them highly endangered. He has established initiatives to preserve knowledge of these dialects for future generations; raised awareness within the communities of the endangered state of their language, stimulating them to preserve their linguistic heritage and empowering them to become directly involved with the process of documentation of the dialects. Training native non- academic speakers to undertake linguistic fieldwork to gather large quantities of grammatical and lexical data as well as recordings of descriptions of traditional life and various types of oral literature has also been key to this initiative.

Submitting Institution

University of Cambridge

Unit of Assessment

Area Studies

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Language Studies, Linguistics

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