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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Omaha and Ponca Digital Dictionary

Recipient: Awakuni-Swetland, Mark Joseph (Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 USA) in affiliation with University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68588 USA)

Goal: The preparation of an online dictionary of Omaha and Ponca, mutually intelligible Siouan languages spoken in Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Description: The project would create a comprehensive dictionary of Omaha and Ponca at a time when there are only a few dozen elderly fluent speakers. Data would be drawn from archival and published documents from nearly a dozen sources. The largest source is an unpublished word list compiled by ethnologist James Owen Dorsey in the late nineteenth century, which includes approximately 20,000 entries written in a complicated orthography. All materials would be digitized and transcribed into the contemporary orthographies used by tribal members and educators. The dictionary would be in a Structured Queried Language database that conforms to standards promulgated under the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data. Omaha has a complex verbal morphology with the possibility of multiple affixes. All words, especially verbs, would be analyzed to determine their roots, their appropriate placement in the dictionary, and which affixed forms should be included. The dictionary would contain a brief grammatical sketch, including a description of the phonemes of the language, its major phonological and morphological patterns, and an outline of sentence structure. This project would make freely available to native communities, students, and researchers a vast collection of Omaha and Ponca language.

Grant: 191639 / PD-50007-08,   Category: Languages,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2008

Documenting Plains Apache: Fieldwork, Archives, and Database

Recipient: O'Neill, Sean (Norman, OK 73019 USA) in affiliation with University of Oklahoma, Norman

Goal: Fieldwork on the grammar, lexicon, and storytelling traditions of the Plains Apache, speakers of an endangered Athabaskan language in Oklahoma. The project would result in a database, which would be used to produce a dictionary and a collection of texts.

Description: This project would produce new material on Plains Apache, a scarcely documented Athabaskan language formerly known as Kiowa-Apache. The original homeland of the Athabaskan family most likely lies in northwestern Canada and Alaska (where the bulk of the languages are spoken today), suggesting a one-time southward migration of the ancestors of the present-day speakers of Plains Apache. When working with a group of closely related languages, it is often possible to reconstruct earlier forms of speech by studying minute differences that have arisen in each of the daughter languages, because each language preserves the material in a slightly different way. Since Plains Apache is the most divergent member of the Apachean branch of Athabaskan, new material on this language variety would play a vital role in reconstructing the prehistory of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples. From another perspective, the speakers of Plains Apache have been in close contact with neighboring Kiowa speakers for well over 100 years, and it would be interesting to assess the degree of influence between these languages. Because the vast majority of the speakers are elderly, this work is urgent. First, I plan to elicit new material on the grammar, lexicon, and storytelling traditions of Plains Apache in order to expand and complete its existing documentation. Second, I would combine the new data with existing archival materials in a database, from which a series of publications would be produced, including a practical dictionary for the tribe, an analytical lexicon with extensive grammatical information, and a collection of narrative texts. Graduate students and a community speaker would be trained in both fieldwork and database construction.

Grant: 191640 / PD-50008-08,   Category: Languages,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2008

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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2006