For the capstone project for this unit, you will write a language profile of a lesser-known or marginalized language. In the practice exercises at the end of each chapter, you will have had a chance to do a little research for your language profile. Now, at the end of the unit, you will combine your research into a language profile that you can share with your classmates.

Step 1: Pick a language

In the spirit of decolonization, I encourage you to pick a language that disrupts the status quo in some way, which can begin to provide you with a deeper understanding of language diversity and the unevenness of the language landscape of the world and in the field of linguistics, such as:

• A language that you have never heard of before (which you can discover by searching a language database like WALS, Ethnologue, or Glottolog).
• A signed or tactile language.
• A language that is negatively affected by colonialism or globalization, especially if you are currently or plan to be involved in community-led revitalization or documentation efforts.
• A non-standard variety of a language (e.g., AAVE or Michif French). To find different dialects of English, I recommend exploring eWAVE.

If your language is the national language of a country or the primary language of instruction at a university somewhere in the world, I would encourage you to dig a little deeper and pick another language.

Step two: Check for sources

Ensure there are enough scholarly sources available for you to be able to complete your profile. How to identify academic sources is explained in Section 2.5.

To find scholarly sources for your language, you can look in the references of the databases above, as well as searching Google scholar and the university library. If you need any help locating sources, ask your instructor!

The number of sources you need will depend on your sources. One full-length descriptive grammar of the language with morphology and syntax sections may be enough for you to complete your profile, especially if the examples are glossed, but I’d be wary if that is the only thing you can find. If there are several single-topic sources about the language (such as journal articles or book chapters), that should also be sufficient.

If you belong to a community whether the language you picked is used, you may also use personal judgments or elicitation with a family member as a source. Please state that you plan to do so in your proposal and check with your instructor that the ethics rules of your institution allow this.

If you cannot find very many sources, consider choosing a different language. (That’s why this is step 2!)

Step three: Justify your language choice

Explain why you picked your language. Make sure you explain how it fits into one of the options from Part 1!

This part only needs to be a couple of sentences long.

Step four: Research the background of your language

Research the background of your language with enough detail that someone who has never heard of it before can situate themselves to the language. Your background should probably answer the following questions:

1. Language name. What is the language’s name? Does it have alternative names that we should be aware of? What is the autonym (the name that users of the language use to refer to it)? What is the best name to use to refer to the language? How is it pronounced? Check to see if any names for the language are considered slurs or derogatory, and avoid those names.
2. Language place. Where is the language spoken? In those regions, is it used by everyone, or by a subset of people? If a subset, who? Be as specific as makes sense, but also make sure you situate it in terms that your reader is likely familiar with.
3. Language users. Approximately how many people use the language?
4. Language politics. What is the language’s political status? How was it affected by colonialism and globalization? Is it an endangered language? Is it an Indigenous language? Is it used only within a particular community or is it used to communicate across regions with different languages? Does it get support from the government? What other languages is it in contact with? Look up the language’s number on the EGIDS scale, which is a measure of its endangerment, and look up what that number means.
5. Language family. What language family does it belong to? Are there other languages in the same family that the reader is likely to be more familiar with? If so, what are they? Use your judgment when deciding whether to list the overarching language family it belongs to, the branch(es) of the language family, or both. This depends on how big the language family is and how well-known it is.

You may not be able to answer all of the sub-questions, but you should address each of the 5 topic areas.

The language databases listed in Step 1 (Ethnologue, Glottolog, WALS, eWAVE) are all good places to find this information. Don’t forget to cite your sources!

Step five: Research one morphosyntactic property of your language

Choose a question from the list below and research how your language behaves with respect to that question. Not all questions will be relevant for all languages. For example, some languages don’t have reduplication, and so reduplication would not be a good topic for such a language. You should choose a topic that has questions relevant to your language and for which sufficient sources exist.

You may choose a topic outside of this list, but you must verify it with your instructor first.

Morphology topics

• What is the pronoun paradigm of your language? What distinctions does it make (case, gender, number, animacy, other…)? How do these morphological features interact?
• Does your language use reduplication? Describe the reduplicative patterns in your language.
• Does your language use non-concatenative morphology? Describe the non-concatenative pattern in your language?
• Does your language have clitics? Describe the behaviour of the clitics. Do the clitics have any special properties?
• What distinctions in tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality does your language make? How do the morphological features interact? What morphological processes are used to make these distinctions?
• Describe an allomorphic process that occurs in your language. Is it predictable or unpredictable allomorphy? How is it conditioned?
• Does your language use case marking? Describe the case system of your language. Is it nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive or another pattern?

Syntax topics

• Compare the word order of the different parts of speech and their arguments. Is your language left-headed, right-headed, or a mix?
  Note: You only want to consider separate words, not affixes. Not all languages use all of these kinds of words. Your language will need to use at least two of them in order for you to choose this question.
  • Does your language use prepositions or postpositions?
    The adposition would be the head of the PP and the NP its argument.
  • Do complementizers and question particles go at the beginning or end of the clause?
    The complementizer or question particle would be the head of the CP and the TP is its argument.
  • Do tense, aspect, and mood particles go before or after the verb?
    A tense/aspect/mood particle would be the head of the TP and the VP would be its argument.
  • Does the object go before or after the verb?
    The verb would be the head of the VP and the object would be its argument.
• Does your language use zero copulas? Does it use zero copulas in all contexts are just some? Look at predicates from different parts of speech and different tenses.
• What do relative clauses look like in your language?
• What do non-finite clauses look like in your language?
• What is the basic word of your language in terms of subject, verb, and object? Are other word orders possible? If so, is there a clear meaning or function that can be attributed to the other word orders?

Topics that combine morphology and syntax

• Is there a distinction between nouns and verbs in your language? How can you tell?
• Is there a distinction between adjectives and adverbs in your language? How can you tell?
• Is there a distinction between verbs and adjectives in your language? How can you tell?
• Does your language use serial verb constructions? How do you know it’s a serial verb? Describe the properties of the serial verb construction in your language. Are the verbs in the serial verb construction adjacent to each other? Are they combined into one word or are they separate words? Which verbs in the serial verb construction bear inflection?
• How does your language indicate the roles of noun phrases? Does it use case marking, adpositions, or a combination of both? Can you tell whether the case marking or adpositions are independent words, affixes, or clitics? What evidence do you have?

Step six: Write a draft language profile

In your introduction, include the justification of your language choice and an overview of your paper. The language background should be incorporated into the introduction and/or the body of your paper. In the body of your paper, you should describe the morphosyntactic property that you picked. In your conclusion, you should summarize your paper. For some hints on how to structure your paper, including some examples of a paper overview for an introduction, check out Section 2.6.

As you describe the properties of your language, be sure to use properly formatted examples to back up your description. How to discuss and attribute data is explained in Section 4.6. How to gloss your examples is explained in Section 4.7 for spoken languages or Section 4.8 for signed languages (coming soon!).

Don’t forget to give your paper a title!

Step seven: Create a bibliography

 Create bibliography entries for all of the sources you used, using CJL citation style. Arrange them in alphabetical order and include them at the end of your paper. CJL citation style is explained in Section 2.7.

Step eight: Revise

Re-read what you have written. Use the following checklist to guide you.

Hint: If you have time, set aside your assignment for at least a day before you revise.

• Does your paper clearly include all of the required components?
  • Which language you chose
  • Why you chose that language
  • A background of the language, with proper citations, discussing all 5 background topics
  • A description of one morphosyntactic property in your language
  • A bibliography of all sources used in your profile in CJL style
• Are there any missing in-text citations? Is every in-text citation accompanied by a bibliography entry?
• Are your arguments and explanations clearly laid out? Did you skip any logical steps in the explanation?
• Is your writing easy to understand?
  Remember that explaining complex ideas in simple language is our goal.
• Does the order of the components make sense, or would they make more sense in another order?
• Is the paper well-organized? Is it divided into paragraphs in a way that makes sense? Are there transitions between each topic? Is it appropriate to use headings to help the reader navigate?
• Review the rubric and consider whether your paper could better satisfy any of the requirements there.

After you have revised for content and organization, read-through again, this time looking at sentence structure and grammar.

Step 9: Submit! 

Follow the submission instructions of your instructor.