Funded Projects Query Form
20 matches

Research and writing a linguistic analysis of a collection of stories narrated by the last first-language speakers (L1) of Coeur d’Alene Salish (snícumšcn/Snchitsu’umshtsn), a Native American language of the Pacific Northwest region.

The Coeur d’Alene (cda) Narratives Project aims to provide a complete linguistic analysis of a collection of 40 stories told between 1985 and 1998 by three of the last first-language speakers of Coeur d’Alene Salish (sncícu?mšcn/Snchitsu’umshtsn). No living L1 speakers remain. The analysis will include audio recordings time-aligned to each line of text. The collection contains stories of several genres, including traditional Coyote stories, historical and political narratives, songs, and personal adventures. It will provide a necessary resource for research on Coeur d’Alene phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse; in comparative Salish linguistics; and in native American literature. The analyzed collection will be archived in the Pacific Northwest Collection at the University of Washington Libraries and will be available online to anyone interested. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe will hold copyright.

Research and writing of a grammar of Eyak, a dormant Alaska Native language, accessible to both scholars and the Eyak community, to be published as a book and e-book, including illustrations and audio files.

This project will create a shorter reference grammar of Eyak (ISO 639-3 eya), a sleeping language once spoken across the Gulf Coast of Alaska from Cordova to Yakutat. Eyak plays a unique role in the linguistic prehistory of Alaska, for it is just as closely related to the neighboring Ahtna language as it is to distant Navajo in the desert Southwest US. This succinct (300-400 pages) work incorporates a modern approach to grammatical description, including links to recordings of Eyak language which illustrate the language in use. The research draws on the work of the late Michael Krauss, world renowned scholar of Eyak and Alaska Native languages, as well as a vast collection of archival recordings from three of the last speakers of the language. The resulting grammar will be a reference for linguists and other scholars, as well as anyone interested in learning the Eyak language.

Translation and annotation of audio recordings for a community- and scholar-accessible online repository of the Native American Gitksan language spoken in Alaska and British Columbia.

Gitksan is the traditional language of the Gitxsan people of Alaska and the northern interior of British Columbia. It is the easternmost member of the Tsimshianic family and highly endangered, with an estimated 300-500 native speakers in their late 50s, at the youngest. Language shift toward English is well underway, in large part due to the effects of the Canadian residential school policy of the 20th century, making the need for language documentation increasingly urgent. Essentially, all documentary work on Gitksan has been conducted in the last 40 years; existing resources include an unpublished grammar, a few short lessons and stories, and several wordlists and phrasebooks of varying levels of detail. There are many areas yet undocumented.
The project's primary goal is the development of a online text repository with several functions:
1) a community-accessible body of narratives and conversations,
2) a base of sample sentences for an existing community-accessible online dictionary in active
development at the University of British Columbia, and
3) a corpus for linguists working on Gitksan to view long-form narrative or conversational data. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork to document and analyze Seke, an endangered language from the southeastern Himalayan region, through audio and video recordings of stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and histories of Seke speakers.

This project aims to build on completed fieldwork to further the documentation of Seke, an endangered and little-documented Tibeto-Burman language of the Tamangic branch, through the creation of a rich, annotated, multi-dialectal corpus of video and audio recordings including stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and stories of Seke speakers. The resulting electronic corpus and outputs will serve both community members and scholars. Seke is one of the least well-known languages of the increasingly well-documented but still relatively little-known Tamangic branch within the Tibeto-Burman language family. Without sustained documentation or virtually any multimedia record, Seke has remained a missing link in our understanding of the branch, being both geographically and typologically at the edge of the Tamangic world and completely surrounded by the Tibetic language Loke. The Seke-speaking area was once considerably larger, and a record of Seke would be significant for our understanding of the cultural, demographic, and natural history of the region. In the context of heavy language contact and outmigration, regional patterns of multilingualism encompassing Seke, Loke, Thakali, Tibetan, Nepali, and now English are shifting rapidly, also a process worthy of study. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork to record and analyze conversations in Salish by elders from the Native American Pend d'Oreille community in western Montana.

Salish (also known as Flathead Salish, Montana Salish, or more specifically by the dialects Bitteroot Salish-Seliš and Pend d’Oreille-Qlispé), is the traditional language of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille community of western Montana. The extremely endangered language belongs to the dialect continuum of Spokane-Kalispel-Pend d’Oreille(s)-Flathead within the Southern Interior branch of the Salishan language family. There are fewer than 20 fluent speakers remaining, the majority of whom are elders over the age of 70. This proposed project will analyze ten previously recorded narratives, chosen by the tribe, and will document and analyze approximately four additional stories from different speakers. Through the analysis of oral storytelling, this project seeks to accomplish the following goals: (1) determine the linguistic features that enact these oral dialogues as narratives or traditional stories through the interlinearization process; (2) determine how these narratives further perpetuate cultural knowledge, understanding, and identity; and (3) contribute to the efforts of the Salish- Pend d’Oreille in the documentation and understanding of their traditional language. (Edited by staff)

Analyzing and digitizing a variety of texts (folktales and other stories, prayers, song lyrics) in Cahto, a Native American language from Northern California.

The goal of Analysis and Documentation of Cahto Language (ktw) Texts is to morphologically and syntactically analyze legacy texts in the Cahto language of Mendocino County, California (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family). This work will make the texts available to scholars and to the Tribe, and also provide a basis for the future creation of a reference grammar of Cahto. The twelve-month period of the fellowship will allow for analysis of at least fifteen of the Bill Ray/Pliny Earle Goddard longer texts of stories, folktales, description of folk characters and practices, and one full-length prayer (Goddard, 1909; Goddard, 1902, 1906). The applicant will also analyze a number of one- or two-line texts (song lyrics, short prayers, etc.) recorded by other researchers, primarily E. M. Loeb (1932). The applicant will systematically phonemicize the texts into the practical orthography used by the Cahto Tribe and represented in the Applicant's 2018 NEH-funded Cahto Dictionary (DEL #FN-255579-17). The text analysis will be done using the same linguistic database software (SIL's FLex/FieldWorks) that produced the Dictionary, allowing easy interlinking between dictionary entries and text examples. FLex database software is a standard platform among linguists for lexical and text documentation. Fieldwork supported by this Fellowship will link the texts, collected over a century ago, with contemporary knowledge in the community. The Applicant is already aware of versions of the stories still told in English, as well as traditional lifeways and technologies reflected in the texts that are still practiced and passed down. Documenting these connections represents a significant secondary goal of the project.

Preparation of almost fifty hours of video recordings in Tlingit, an endangered language of Coastal Alaska for archiving and online access (transcription, translation, annotation, and post-production).

The vitality of Tlingit, a member of the Na-Dene family, is rated 8a – moribund (Alaska Native Language Center 2007) on the EGIDScale (Lewis and Simmons 2010). Between 2007 and 2013, the Tlingit Conversation Documentation project, NSF-DEL # 0651787 and # 0852788, recorded spontaneous Tlingit conversations. The production exceeded the project’s goals, leaving additional material to be completed. For the fellowship proposed here, the PI, with five or more L1 Tlingit speakers, University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) Tlingit language faculty, and undergraduate students in advanced Tlingit courses will use ELAN software to complete the remaining 27.9 hours of Tlingit transcription, 7.5 hours of English translation, and preparation of a Tlingit/English print version for each of the 96 recordings in the 48.5 hour corpus. We will prepare the remaining 20 hours of bilingual subtitled videos for web posting of the recordings. We will archive all results from this fellowship with the previously recorded material at the Alaska State Library, Archives, and Museum and the Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) William L. Paul, Sr. Archive. Because of its broad range of content, this primary source video material from the mouths of L1 Tlingit speakers, with the added value of translation and transcription, will be of use by linguists, ethnographers, archeologists, historians, anthropologists, artists, musicologists, and others. (Edited by staff)

An annotated edition, in digital and audio form, of nine folktales in the endangered Kutenai language, spoken in the northwestern United States and southeastern British Columbia, Canada.

Kutenai (also Kootenai, Kootenay, Ktunaxa, and Ksanka) is a language isolate spoken in the northwest of the United States and in southeast British Columbia by no more than a handful of fluent speakers. The effort to document Kutenai folktales was begun a century ago by Franz Boas, and his student Alexander Chamberlain, who transcribed 77 such stories, leading to the 1918 publication, Kutenai Tales. This project seeks funding to make nine of these stories accessible as a lasting documentary, cultural, pedagogical, and analytic resource. The goals of this project are: 1) to complete the in-progress creation of searchable text from image files of nine of these stories; 2) to convert a number of these stories into modern Kutenai orthography and spelling, in order to 3) create audio-recordings of these stories, first being read by one of the few remaining fluent and literate native speakers, and then being retold in his own words; 4) to complete an interlinear database with linguistically annotated and glossed versions of these stories; and 5) to perform preliminary analysis on the interlinearized texts to investigate the relation between grammar and discourse structure. The data produced for this project—searchable text files, interlinearized texts, audio-recordings, and metadata spreadsheets—will be archived at the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia.

Fieldwork and research to document Lolak, a near-extinct Austronesian language spoken in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia.

This project seeks to continue the PI's work documenting and preserving Lolak, a near-extinct Austronesian language spoken in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. Once the majority language of the town of Lolak, the Lolak language has long been losing ground to not only the local lingua franca, Manado Malay, and the national language, Indonesian, but also to a constant in-flow of immigrants. This situation can only be expected to continue at an accelerated rate now that the district capital has been moved to the town of Lolak. The vast majority of Lolak speakers are over the age of 60, and the two oldest speakers (aged 75 and 80) have signed a letter expressing their desire for the PI's work on their language to continue, as have two local community leaders. Over the past ten years, the PI has made several trips to the town of Lolak to assess the competency of the remaining speakers, elicit wordlists and sentences, and build a lexical database. He has also made over twenty hours of archive-quality digital audio recordings of some of the most fluent remaining speakers, covering a wide range of subject matter. The main work to be performed during the fellowship period is: (1) to transcribe and translate the audio recordings; (2) to expand the lexical database with all of the new vocabulary found in the transcribed recordings; and (3) to complete three academic articles about typologically rare linguistic features found in Lolak. Two extended trips totaling ten months will be made to Lolak town, separated by a two-month stay at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, in the Department of Linguistics, where the PI has access to the university's expansive library with one of the world's most comprehensive collections of materials on the Asia-Pacific region. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork and research to document and analyze Secoya, an endangered language of Amazonian Peru.

This fellowship will support key components of the PI`s ongoing work to document Secoya, an endangered Tukanoan language of Peruvian Amazonia. The PI will produce a corpus of fully transcribed, glossed, and translated video recordings, and a comprehensive account of central features of the language: its noun categorization system and complex predicate constructions. The Secoya people live mainly in Loreto, Peru, inhabiting nine villages in the area. The total Secoya population is estimated at 600, about half having migrated to Ecuador during the Peru-Ecuador conflict in 1941. In contrast to what is reported for Ecuador, the Secoyas in Peru are mostly dominant in their heritage language, and, given their geographic isolation, this variety has not been influenced by any other neighboring language. However, this sociolinguistic context is changing rapidly. In the last decade alone, a growing Spanish/Secoya bilingualism among children and a change in attitudes towards Secoya identity among youngsters has been observed. This situation has become a concern for the community, and they are now putting forward initiatives to maintain their language. Thus, this is a crucial time to document Secoya and support ongoing community efforts. This project, the first to be focused entirely in Peruvian Secoya, will take advantage of current favorable conditions: a well-established collaborative relationship with the community, trained native speakers, and an efficient workflow. (Edited by staff)