Endangered and Underdescribed LanguagesResearch on endangered and under-described languages is comparative research on the diversity and uniformity of the languages of the world. This is an area of special initiative at the NSF, NEH and other agencies. Two NSF funded projects are underway at present, one on the Malay spoken in Jambi Province in Sumatra, and the second on the Algonquian language, Passamaquoddy, spoken in Maine and New Brunswick. Our research on endangered and under-described languages is related to experimental research within the the Cognitive Science Program because an especially important area of research is the use of experimental methodologies to study language acquisition etc. among speakers of under-described language. For instance, members of the Cognitive Science Program participate in a large study of first-language acquisition in Indonesia funded by the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a study that applies experimental methods to understudied and Endangered and Underdescribed Languages spoken in Indonesia.
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