Pike Center awards two small grants

Through its Small Grants Program, the Pike Center sponsors research and publication that address issues faced by language communities on the margins of society. We are pleased to announce that two grants have been awarded in the latest cycle of this program.

$1,900 has been awarded to Kenneth S. Olson for a project entitled “Dental approximant vs. fricative contrast in Kikamba.” The voiced dental approximant is phonemic in at least fifteen of the world’s languages, yet the International Phonetic Alphabet has no symbol for it, in part because it has never been shown to contrast with the voiced dental fricative. This gap creates problems for linguists working in the languages concerned, and it reinforces the stigma that outsiders often attach to the sound. Building on audio and video recordings of two speakers of Kikamba, a Bantu language of Kenya, this project presents instrumental evidence that the two sounds contrast. The evidence draws on tongue position, the length of formant transitions, and zero-crossing rates. Results will be presented at the 21st International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Victoria, British Columbia, in August 2027 and published in its proceedings. They will also support a proposal to the International Phonetic Association’s 2029 convention to add a symbol for the dental approximant to the IPA chart. Dr. Olson is a Senior Linguistics Consultant with SIL Global; he holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

$3,500 has been awarded to Karl R. Anderson for a project entitled “Methods for census-based language demography,” the first paper in a planned series, The Ethnolinguistic Groups of Indonesia. A national census is the only source that counts every language community at the same moment, but its administrative categories rarely line up with recognized languages. Indonesia’s 2010 census used more than 2,500 ethnic and language labels against roughly 700 ISO 639-3 codes, with no published guide connecting the two. Many labels turn out to be geographic names, umbrella terms, or statistical artifacts, and the pairing of an ethnic group with its heritage language often cannot be guessed from the names. Without that pairing, speaker populations and intergenerational transmission cannot be measured reliably. This project will complete and publish the methods paper documenting the full pipeline, from raw census microdata to defensible profiles for each language, so that other researchers can apply it to the census data of their own countries. The project will produce an article in the Journal of Language Survey Reports, an open R implementation of the method, and a paper co-presented at a linguistics conference in Indonesia in 2027. Dr. Anderson (formerly published as Karl Anderbeck) is a Senior Language Assessment Consultant with SIL Global and an alumnus of the Pike Scholar program; he holds a PhD from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. He will be working with Christina Natasha, who holds an MSc in Data Science from the University of Glasgow, and Fandis Nggarang.

The next cycle of the Pike Center Small Grants Program (of up to $3,500) will be awarded in February, but note that the deadline for submitting a Letter of Intent is December 20. The program supports both research projects (which result in the publication of research results) and research planning projects (which result in the submission of a larger funding proposal to a funding agency). For more information on eligibility and how to apply, see the program guidelines, as well as the listing of small grants awarded for examples of successful proposals. Prospective grantees who are interested in submitting a letter of intent are encouraged to be in touch with steve_watters@sil.org.