One of the Center’s PIs, Harald Hammarström, starts a new project, funded by Riksbankensjubileumsfond. For the next 6 years, the team will dive headlong into the peripheries of human linguistic ability. It’s one of two RJ Programs funded this year.
Big congratulations!
Linguistic diversity: a manifestation of human capacities and a footprint of history
Abstract
In this program, we explore the outer limits of human language ability. We break new ground by shifting the focus of linguistic research from the properties that languages have in common to discovering and exploring exceptional linguistic phenomena that have so far eluded science. The world’s linguistic diversity is far from fully mapped. Our knowledge of the full breadth of the human conceptual world – its “design space” – depends entirely on our discovering and investigating unknown and rare phenomena in the grammar and vocabulary of lesser-known languages. The task is urgent: unexplored languages and linguistic phenomena are being lost at a breakneck pace. Drawing on our expertise in endangered language communities around the world, the program launches a groundbreaking agenda to discover the linguistic unknown.
The program takes a broad approach to fundamental areas of the human conceptual world – time, space, person, and knowledge – but shines a light beyond the very limits of our current understanding. We open up new perspectives for comparative language research and enrich language theory with significant new insights. We document dwindling forms of human expression and develop a digital resource that preserves this language data for the future. The program places Sweden’s leading experts in language documentation and linguistic diversity at the centre of an international, interdisciplinary network of researchers. It supports a new generation of researchers in Sweden and abroad.
Read more: Outforskade språk ska vidga vår syn på mänsklig språkförmåga (Göteborg universitet, in Swedish)
