An Online Nahuatl Lexical Database: Bridging Past, Present, and Future Speakers

Recipient: Wood, Stephanie G (Eugene, OR 97403-1201 USA) in affiliation with University of Oregon, Eugene (Eugene, OR 97403 USA)

Goal: The preparation of a multilingual dictionary of the Nahuatl language.

Description: With years of experience collaborating on the Nahuatl language and managing large grants, the Wired Humanities Project at the University of Oregon and academic teams in Mexico are proposing to create a multilingual, no-cost, Nahuatl lexical database with unparalleled dimensions. The database will include the first-ever monolingual dictionary of Nahuatl with its own online interface. We are choosing Eastern Huastecan Nahuatl for the core dictionary because it will serve the largest number of living Nahuatl speakers, but also because we can enhance it with comparisons that will serve speakers of other endangered dialects of the language. We will also provide Spanish translations that bilingual speakers can offer and access through an additional online interface. To this modern Nahuatl written material we will add Classical examples, extracting attestations from recently published colonial manuscripts and studies of the same, with their Spanish and English translations and commentaries. It is our sincere goal to bridge the gap between Modern and Classical Nahuatl and bolster native speakers' literacy and access to the unparalleled cultural legacy that potentially thousands of manuscripts written in Nahuatl can represent. Finally, this lexical database will have the enhancement of audio files pulled from focus group discussions where university students who are native speakers come together to consider word usage and meanings across dialects and capture vital contextualizing language and ethnographic examples.

Grant: 196815 / PD-50010-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2009

Mon-Khmer Languages Project

Recipient: Sidwell, Paul (San Clemente, CA 92673-2719 USA) in affiliation with CRCL INC

Goal: The preparation of a lexical database, an etymological dictionary, and a collaborative Web site for research on the Mon-Khmer languages, which include the national languages of Vietnam and Cambodia as well as those of communities in India, China, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand.

Description: The Mon-Khmer Languages Project is developing badly needed research and reference resources for the Mon-Khmer language family. By far the largest subgroup of the Austroasiatic stock, the roughly 150 Mon-Khmer languages are of great antiquity and extraordinary linguistic interest, and are of primary importance for the study of Southeast Asian history and culture. Mon-Khmer languages are the national languages of Vietnam and Cambodia, and are found in communities large and small in India and China, and across broad swaths of Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand. The project is creating three primary resources: a Mon-Khmer languages database, a Mon-Khmer etymological dictionary, and a collaborative website for Mon-Khmer language research.

Grant: 194473 / PW-50380-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2009

Archiving Significant Collections of Latin American Endangered Language Resources II

Recipient: Sherzer, Joel F (Austin, TX 78712 USA) in affiliation with University of Texas, Austin

Goal: Digital archiving of endangered Mexican and South American linguistic materials to be made accessible by the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.

Description: The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a digital repository of multimedia materials. A central part of AILLA's mission is to locate valuable language resources, digitize and catalog them in accordance with international standards, house them in a secure repository, and make them accessible to indigenous people, researchers, and interested laypersons worldwide. The two-year Archiving Significant Collections II (ASC-II) project will perform this service for the following six collections: 1) Achuar and Shuar [Ecuador and Peru]; 2) Quichua and Quechua [Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru]; 3) Tzotzil and other Mayan languages [Mexico]; 4) Pastaza Quechua [Ecuador]; 5) Huasteca Nahua [Mexico]; and 6) Tucano [Brazil].

Grant: 196816 / PD-50011-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2009

Universal Scripts Project

Recipient: Anderson, Deborah Winthrop (Berkeley, CA 94720-2650 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94720 USA)

Goal: A research and development project to incorporate seventeen historical and minority language scripts into the Unicode standard for character representation.

Description: Although computer users in many parts of the world can now communicate in hundreds of languages by using their own native writing systems, there are still linguistic minority groups, and users of historical writing systems, who cannot. This is because the letters and symbols of these scripts are not yet part of the international character encoding standard, known as Unicode. Since continued corporate interest and support for these scripts is uncertain, communication among the groups who use them, and long-term access to their written cultural and historical resources, is threatened -- creating a serious gap for humanities scholarship. This project will fund proposals to adopt five modern and twelve historical scripts into the standard, and will foster collaboration among scholars, users, and institutions to continue working on more proposals, so that computers will ultimately support all the world???s scripts.

Grant: 194534 / PW-50441-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2009

Documentation of Chimiini, a Bantu Language of Somalia

Recipient: Henderson, Brent M (Gainesville, FL 32611-2002 USA) in affiliation with University of Florida (Gainesville, FL 32611 USA)

Goal: The preparation of a grammar, recordings, a lexicon, texts, an orthography, and a Web site on Chimiini, an endangered Bantu language formerly spoken in Somalia.

Description: Due to Somalia's civil war in the 1990s, the vast majority of Chimiini's 20,000 speakers now live in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Kenya where the pressures of shifting to a culturally and economically dominant language like English or Swahili are intense. Because the language is not being passed on to succeeding generations, the number of Chimiini speakers will rapidly decrease over the next few decades. Yet Chimiini remains poorly documented, represented only by an academic lexicon and a handful of academic linguistics papers. The project will be carried out by collecting linguistic material from large refugee communities. The materials that will result from this project include (1) a reference grammar of Chimiini, (2) a corpus of digitally-archived recordings, (3) two collections of texts including traditional stories, proverbs, and personal histories published in English and Chimiini (one intended for linguists and one for non-linguists), (4) a basic lexicon/phrasebook, (5) a standard orthography, (6) a public Web site with multimedia content about the language and its speakers, and (7) scholarly articles on issues in theoretical linguistics. Furthermore, the collection of texts intended for non-linguists will employ the standard orthography, making it useful for literacy development among the refugee groups.

Grant: 196814 / PD-50009-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2009

RELISH: RENDERING ENDANGERED LANGUAGES LEXICONS INTEROPERABLE THROUGH STANDARDS HARMONIZATION

Recipient: Aristar-Dry, Helen (Ypsilanti, MI 48197-0000 USA) in affiliation with Eastern Michigan University (Ypsilanti, MI 48197 USA)

Goal: An effort to unify two digital collections of endangered languages with special attention given to harmonizing the European and American standards for language documentation and lexicon building.

Description: When a lexicon constitutes the only record of a dying or already extinct language, it can contribute unique linguistic and cultural information to our store of scientific knowledge. And making it interoperable with other lexical data becomes a critical research priority. However, there still exist major barriers to lexicon interoperability. The most significant barrier is that standards-setting bodies have arrived at different standards for format and markup on the two sides of the Atlantic. The RELISH project will create an interoperable virtual archive by addressing a two-pronged problem: (1) the lack of harmonization between digital standards for lexical information in Europe and America, and (2) the lack of interoperability among existing lexicons of endangered languages, in particular those created with the Shoebox lexicon-building software.

Grant: 196322 / HG-50010-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: NEH/DFG Enriching Digital Collections,   Year Awarded: 2009

Computer-Based Data Processing and Management for Blackfoot Phonetics and Phonology

Recipient: Miyashita, Mizuki (Missoula, MT 59812 USA) in affiliation with University of Montana

Goal: Development of a database to store and manage sound clips of the Blackfoot language.

Description: More than half of the 6000 world languages have never been adequately described. We propose to create a database system to automatically capture and manage interested sound clips in Blackfoot (an endangered language spoken in Alberta, Canada, and Montana) for a phonetic and phonological analysis. Taking Blackfoot speeches as input, the system generates a list of audio clips containing a sequence of sounds or certain accent patterns based on research interests. Existing computational linguistic techniques such as information processing and artificial intelligence are extended to tackle issues specific to Blackfoot linguistics, and database techniques are adopted to support better data management and linguistic queries. This project is innovative because application of technology in Native American phonetics and phonology is underdeveloped. It enhances humanity with the digital framework to document and analyze endangered languages and can also benefit the research in other languages.

Grant: 197809 / HD-50840-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT)

Recipient: Matisoff, James A (Berkeley, CA 94720 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Berkeley

Goal: Consultation to develop a long-term sustainability plan for an online etymological dictionary and thesaurus of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the common ancestor of languages spoken in China, India, and Southeast Asia.

Description: The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project at UC Berkeley is a linguistics research project, aimed at the reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the mother language of Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and hundreds of Loloish minority languages of Asia.

Grant: 189824 / PW-50122-08,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2008

Minto Songs

Recipient: Tuttle, Siri (Fairbanks, AK 99775-7680 USA) in affiliation with University of Alaska, Fairbanks (Fairbanks, AK 99775 USA)

Goal: The collection, digitization, organization, and archival storage, as well as dissemination among the Minto Athabascan community, of recorded performances of Alaskan Athabascan songs.

Description: Among the cultural objects gathered in the last century from indigenous groups in the Americas is a large amount of recorded song. Among Alaskan Athabascans, song serves as a community-internal activity that supports native language use and cultural revitalization, and also as a marker of village identity in the larger communities. The Minto Athabascan community in Alaska is the last village that has speakers of the Lower Tanana Athabascan language, and it has a very strong song tradition. We propose to organize the Minto song data available to us (Alaska Native Language Center @ UAF; Polar Regions collections at Rasmuson Library, and in the Rooth & Lundstrom collections in Sweden) and to make it usable by community members by creating web-ready multimedia pages that can be added to existing websites and controlled by the Village of Minto. Annotations for songs will be recorded with Minto elders who can identify the composers and occasions for which the songs were composed.

Grant: 191206 / HD-50298-08,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2008

Mon-Khmer Languages Project

Recipient: Sidwell, Paul (San Clemente, CA 92673-2719 USA) in affiliation with CRCL INC

Goal: Preparation of a lexical database, an etymological dictionary, and a collaborative Web site for research on the Mon-Khmer languages, which include the national languages of Vietnam, Cambodia, communities in India, China, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand.

Description: The Mon-Khmer Languages Project will develop badly needed research and reference resources for the Mon-Khmer language family. By far the largest subgroup of the Austroasiatic stock, the roughly 150 Mon-Khmer languages are of great antiquity and extraordinary linguistic interest, and are of primary importance for the study of Southeast Asian history and culture. Mon-Khmer languages are the national languages of Vietnam and Cambodia, and are found in communities large and small in India and China, and across broad swaths of Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand. The project will create three primary resources: a Mon-Khmer languages database, a Mon-Khmer etymological dictionary, and a collaborative website for Mon-Khmer language research.

Grant: 184793 / PM-50012-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Reference Materials,   Year Awarded: 2007

Berkeley Indigenous Language Resources: Access, Archiving, and Documentation

Recipient: Garrett, Andrew (Berkeley, CA 94720-2650 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94720 USA)

Goal: Enchanced description of and access to linguistic materials, including fieldwork notes, manuscripts, and audio recordings that document over 130 endangered American Indian languages.

Description: The University of California, Berkeley, has sponsored language documentation throughout California and the American West since 1901. For the past 55 years this work has largely been undertaken by linguists affiliated with the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (SCOIL). The products of this research and that of other linguists included field notes, manuscripts, and audio recordings housed in four Berkeley repositories. The Bancroft Library and Hearst Museum of Anthropology hold most of the older records; materials collected since 1952 are housed in SCOIL and the Berkeley Language Center. Together these collections form the largest university archive of Native American language materials and one of the five most important American linguistic archives of any kind. Despite its importance, this material is inconsistently described, making it difficult to locate resources related to a specific interest. With the assistance of a professional archivist--who is also a trained linguist with experience in language documentation--the project's staff would improve the quality and quantity of information in the SCOIL catalog; create metadata records conforming to the Open Language Archiving Community standard to share information across institutions; devise a controlled vocabulary for California languages that relates the designations used by both scholars and Native communities; and develop a Web interface to provide access to full metadata for all SCOIL collections and abbreviated metadata for related resources at other Berkeley repositories, as well as links to digitized SCOIL materials. The project would also support Native American community revitalization and documentation efforts. Access and use policies would be refined, and staff would provide professional and research support to community-based projects.

Grant: 186713 / PD-50005-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2007

Klallam Dictionary and Electronic Text Archive

Recipient: Montler, Timothy R (Denton, TX 76203-3827 USA) in affiliation with University of North Texas (Denton, TX 76203 USA)

Goal: Preparation of a dictionary of Klallam, an endangered Salishan language spoken in Washington state and Vancouver Island, and the archiving of Klallam texts and audio video materials.

Description: Klallam is an American Indian language of the Salishan family spoken on three reservations on Washington's Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island in Canada. The aim of this project is the production of the first full dictionary of the Klallam language together with a digital audio and video collection of transcribed and translated speech in various genres. The dictionary database would be built so as to be easily formatted for both print and online versions. It would be designed to be both accessible to Klallam language learners and useful for scholars of language and culture. Products of this project, all Unicode compliant, would include: 1) a digitized archive of over 140 60-to-90-minute audio recordings in Waveform audio format; 2) a comprehensive dictionary of the Klallam language in Extended Markup Language format keyed to a large digital text archive; 3) a ready-to-print formatted version of the dictionary; 4) an on-line, hypertext version of the dictionary; 5) over 200 Klallam texts, digitized, transcribed, translated and analyzed; 6) 20 Klallam language texts recorded in 1992 on VHS video, converted to digital Audio Video Interleave format for archiving; and 7) these 20 video texts subtitled in Klallam and English and converted into interactive language study tools with links to grammar and dictionary entries.

Grant: 186714 / PD-50006-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2007

Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project [STEDT]

Recipient: Matisoff, James A (Berkeley, CA 94720 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Berkeley

Goal: The compilation of an etymological dictionary and thesaurus of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the common ancestor of languages spoken in China, India, and Southeast Asia.

Description: The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) Project in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, has been going on for nearly 20 years, with the goal of producing (a) an etymological dictionary of Proto-Tibeto-Burman and Proto-Sino-Tibetan, arranged according to the phonological shape of the roots; as well as (b) a thesaurus of these proto-lexicons, where the roots are arranged by their meaning. Large databases have been created from more than 500 sources covering about 350 languages and dialects, permitting the reconstruction of nearly 3000 roots, and the formulation of diachronic sound-laws and patterns of semantic change. Many publications have emerged from this research. During the next grant period, the emphasis will be on electronic archiving and dissemination of our data and conclusions, and on collaboration with research institutes in China which have created independent databases of their own.

Grant: 184853 / PM-50072-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Reference Materials,   Year Awarded: 2007

Documentation of Moribund Languages of Furu Awa, Cameroon (Bikya [byb], Bishuo [bwh], Busuu [bju])

Recipient: Good, Jeffrey C (Buffalo, NY 14260 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo (Amherst, NY 14228 USA)

Description: This project will document the moribund Furu languages spoken in the Furu-Awa subdivision of the Northwest Province of Cameroon. It will result in (1) the creation of documentary resources in the form of audio and visual recordings; (2) the creation of descriptive materials in the form of transcribed and annotated texts, word lists, and information on their grammars; and (3) an assessment of the possibilities for future documentary work. The field work described in this proposal will take place in the town of Wum. The languages to be included are Bikya, Bishuo, and Busuu. There is, for practical purposes, no existing documentation on any of these; the number of speakers ranges from as many as eight for Busuu to as few as one for Bikya and Bishuo, and Bikya, in fact, may already be extinct. The languages are probably Bantoid but not clearly related to surrounding languages or to each other, making the need to gather information on them before they become extinct especially pressing. The languages provide one of the few sources of evidence for understanding what peoples may have occupied Furu-Awa in the distant past in a region believed to be part of the Proto-Bantu homeland and may offer crucial links between Bantu languages and the rest of the Benue-Congo language group. They may also offer clues into the nature of Bantu expansion itself. (Edited by staff)

Grant: 186712 / RZ-50817-07,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Collaborative Research,   Year Awarded: 2007

Archiving Significant Collections of Endangered Language Resources

Recipient: Sherzer, Joel F (Austin, TX 78712 USA) in affiliation with University of Texas, Austin

Goal: Digital archiving of Mexican, Central, and South American linguistic materials to be made accessible by The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA).

Description: The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a Web-based repository of multimedia materials that are digitize in accordance with international standards and are made accessible to scholars and speaker communities worldwide. In collaboration with the eight linguists who have collected materials over the last 40 years, the project staff would digitize and preserve recordings and written materials that document languages of Costa Rica, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.

Grant: 181816 / PD-50003-06,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2006

Wichi: Documentation, Description, and Training

Recipient: Grondona, Veronica (Ypsilanti, MI 48197 USA) in affiliation with Eastern Michigan University

Goal: The preparation of language description tools for Wichí (an indigenous language of South America spoken in Argentina and Bolivia) with focus on the undocumented Central Pilcomayo dialect.

Description: The goal of this project is the documentation of Wichí, an indigenous language of South America spoken in Argentina and Bolivia. The project would produce a dictionary, a reference grammar, and a collection of morphologically analyzed and translated texts for Central Pilcomayo Wichí. It would also establish the range of variation across the very divergent Wichí dialects and produce other online resources for scholarly and educational activities.

Grant: 181815 / PD-50002-06,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2006

Documenting Edo North Languages with Oral Narratives

Recipient: Schaefer, Ronald P (Edwardsville, IL 62026-1431 USA) in affiliation with Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville (Edwardsville, IL 62026 USA)

Goal: Documentation of Edo North languages of Nigeria through linguistic analysis of oral narrative samples that will be transcribed and translated. The project would also prepare a digital archive of the field recordings.

Description: This project will document 15-20 endangered and rapidly fading Edo North (EN) languages spoken in Nigerian villages. For each text, the collaborators will develop interrelated orthographic and interlinear transcriptions, with English translations, that will be disseminated in print and electronic forms. The project will also archive and make accessible the original recordings.

Grant: 181819 / PD-50004-06,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation,   Year Awarded: 2006

A Database of Mutsun, an Extinct California American Indian Language

Recipient: Warner, Natasha Lynn (Tucson, AZ 85721-0028 USA) in affiliation with University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ 85721 USA)

Goal: The transcription and encoding of field notes on the extinct language of the Mutsun, a California Indian tribe, resulting in a text database and a lexical/dictionary database, to be available also in print.

Description: This project will encode all archival information about the extinct Mutsun language into two databases. Mutsun is a Costanoan Native American language, spoken in the San Francisco area until 1930. Several early linguists recorded vast quantities of information about Mutsun, but this information, although on microfilm, is inaccessible because it is in the form of unanalyzed fieldnotes, primarily handwritten. The project will enter all of the archival information into an annotated text database and a dictionary database, producing a hard copy dictionary and hard copy annotated text publication as well as searchable databases. These products will be of great benefit to the Mutsun people, to other Native American groups, and to linguists.

Grant: 174481 / PA-51356-05,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation/Access Projects,   Year Awarded: 2005

Digital Preservation of Mesoamerican Linguistic Archives

Recipient: Goldsmith, John A (Chicago, IL 60637 USA) in affiliation with University of Chicago

Goal: The digital reformatting, application of retrieval metadata, and cataloging of 583 hours of sound recordings dated 1885 to 1957 that collectively represent nine extinct or endangered Mesoamerican languages.

Grant: 174424 / PA-51299-05,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation/Access Projects,   Year Awarded: 2005

Ensuring the Teaching of Research Skills for the Documentation of Endangered Languages

Recipient: Ward, Gregory (Washington, DC 20036 USA) in affiliation with Linguistic Society of America (Washington, DC 20007 USA)

Goal: An endowed professorship in field research skills for the documentation of endangered languages, a course in such skills to be taught at each biennial Linguistic Institute.

Description: At least 3000 of the approximately 7000 languages presently spoken will disappear in this century. Linguists, with field methods training, are uniquely prepared to document these endangered languages and to help communities preserve them. Since many departments do not offer such training, the LSA will endow a professorship, to be awarded to a distinguished scholar, to teach field methods at the biennial summer linguistic institute beginning in 2005. The LSA requests a matching grant to fund the Hale Professorship and the attendance of a native speaker of the endangered language to be studied. This will ensure students have access to the special training and tools to work effectively with communities whose language and culture is threatened.

Grant: 172268 / CH-50150-05,   Division: Challenge Grants,   Program: Challenge Grants,   Year Awarded: 2005