Introduction and Resources

In the Language Adoption Project, you're supposed to work in pairs on a language of your choice, as long as the language is unfamiliar or endangered. There's plenty of these out there, so you shouldn't have trouble finding one. The goal of the project is for you to get to know a language that you haven't known much about before, and apply some of the concepts and analytical tools we discussed in class to that language to test our theory of grammar. For example, you'll need to find out which of the parameters we talked about are relevant to your adopted language, and whether the langauge presents challenges to the theory we've been proposing. Of course, you're also expected to give some basic information about the language, where it is spoken, by how many speakers. if it's endangered, etc. I will post a few guidelines soon to help you proceed methodically, but for now, you'll need to start thinking about what langauge you want to work on and with who.

• A good resource on languages of the world which I mentioned in class  is the “The world atlas of language structures”, which is available in the main library at the Main Atlas Case  G1046.E3 W6 2005.

• An extensive list of languages and assoicated descriptive grammars is available here:

• A shortened list that I created from online resources is available here.