Unexplored language phenomena (UNLAP): Identifying,documenting, and explaining the outer reaches of human expressive capacity

This program explores the outer reaches of the human language capacity. It breaks new ground by redirecting the linguistic inquiry towards the discovery and investigation of extraordinary language phenomena that remain undocumented. The world’s linguistic diversity is far from fully charted. Identification and examination of unknown phenomena in the grammars and vocabularies of understudied languages are crucial to our understanding of the full scope – or design space – of the human language faculty. The task is urgent. Understudied languages and phenomena are disappearing at an alarming rate. Building on unique first-hand access to a global sample of endangered speech communities, the program implements an innovative roadmap to discovery of linguistic unknowns. It broadly addresses linguistically encoded fundamental realms of human experience – such as space, time, person, and matter – but takes a sharp aim at the very limits of current knowledge. Furthermore, it situates its mission and findings at the heart of linguistic typology, and it makes crucial contributions to linguistic theory. It documents disappearing manifestations of human expressiveness and develops its record into a digital resource for future reference. The program puts Sweden’s leading experts on language documentation and linguistic diversity at the center of an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars, and it nurtures a new generation of researchers in Sweden and abroad.