Language Legacies Grant Recipients - 2010
Namgay Thinley and Gwendolyn Hyslop - Dzongkha Development Commission / University of Oregon
An Orthography and Grammatical Sketch of ’Olekha
This project is the winner of the Bright Award for 2010. ’Olekha is an extremely endangered language of Bhutan with possibly just one elderly speaker left. From the little we know of this language, it seems quite different from other related languages. It seems likely that ’Olekha may retain archaic features which have been replaced everywhere else by the influence of Bodish languages, but further documentation is necessary to determine if this is true. Because members of the ’Olekha community are concerned about the endangerment of their language, the priority is the phonological analysis and working orthography along with a brief grammatical sketch of the language. Elicitation, combined with the knowledge of the phonologies of other East Bodish languages, will serve as the primary methodology for phonological analysis. Another goal of the research is to collect as many local stories, legends, oral histories and storytelling/verbal arts in general as possible. These recordings will be used as a springboard for grammatical analysis, supplementing the data with elicitation. This study of the language will produce the first phonological sketch and grammatical outline of the language. As an unusual variety of a relatively unstudied sub-group, a description of the language will be a contribution to historical and comparative Tibeto-Burman studies.
Tye Swallow - Saanich Adult Education Center
SENĆOŦEN Language Revitalization and Sustainability Plan - Learning from Homeland Curriculum Development Project
The mission of the SENĆOŦEN language department of the Saanich Indian School Board (British Columbia) is to begin immersion programming from preschool to grade three. SENĆOŦEN is a highly endangered language with only 20 fluent speakers. The ELF award will be used towards funding a “Learning from Place Language Immersion” curriculum that will directly feed into the current development of a university-level language immersion course for a new Language Revitalization degree program being developed by the University of Victoria.
Lalnunthangi Chhangte - Converge Worldwide
Documentation of the Ralte Language
Ralte is a Tibeto-Burman language, classified as belonging to the Kuki-Chin languages and closely related to Mizo (Lushai). However, Ralte shares more similarities with the Paihte language, spoken further northeast in the state of Manipur in northeastern India. The Raltes once lived as a separate community, speaking their own language, but they now consider themselves to belong to the Lushai language and culture group. Thus, most people are surprised to find that Ralte was once spoken widely in the Lushai inhabited areas of present-day Mizoram. The remaining 80 fluent speakers have made efforts on their own to record the language. The goal of this project is to gather all the data that has been collected so far and to organize and preserve the information so that future generations will know what the language sounded like.
Chad Thompson and Dani Tippmann - The Three Rivers Language Center / Whitley County Historical Museum
The Miami Language and Cultural Camp
The Miami language, an endangered Native American language from the lower Great Lakes region, has been classified as “extinct” but the 15th edition of Ethnologue (2005) notes that “There are some who know a few words and phrases. A revitalization is in progress” (Gordon 2000). An increasing number of Miami people are currently speaking their language, and the latest Ethnologue no longer categorizes the language as extinct (Lewis 2009). The language is still at least highly endangered, and this project will draw on the expertise, personnel and materials of other successful programs to support a day camp for Miami children between the ages of 10 and 15. During the week, children will be encouraged to speak as much of the language as possible while they make culturally-related crafts with the help of elders/cultural teachers and camp counselors and are immersed in the Miami language as much as possible.
Digna Lipa-od Adonis - Benguet Network
Eg Tayo Kari Dibkhanan, Let Us Not Forget: A Documentation of the Ibaloy Indigenous Language in Benguet, Philippines
There are approximately 55,000 native speakers of Ibaloy, an endangered language belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages spoken in northern Luzon in the southern part of the Province of Benguet in the Philippines. Ibaloy has been giving way to Ilocano, with Tagalog and English as second languages. This project aims to support two ongoing Ibaloy language and culture preservation initiatives through interviews with native speakers to compile an extensive list of Ibaloy conversational phrases, dialogue text material on cultural subjects, and word lists that make up selected semantic domains. Audio recordings will be collected of the listed words, phrases and themes and endangered cultural activities will be gathered by video recording.
Adam Baker - Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Ishkashimi Language Documentation & Development
Ishkashimi is spoken by about 1,500 people in Afghanistan and another 1,000 in Tajikistan. A recent shift to Dari, the language of wider communication, has led many Ishkashimis to believe that their children will speak only Dari in the future. At the same time, the Ishkashimi people value their language and wish to see it developed, responding very positively to the ideas of producing an orthographic system for Ishkashimi, producing Ishkashimi books, and holding literacy classes in Ishkashimi. The first goal is to support the language community’s becoming literate in Ishkashimi, including developing books. The second goal is to produce an annotated corpus of Ishkashimi language data, to be made available to linguists in the form of a language data archive.
Olga Lovick - First Nations University of Canada
Transcription, Translation, and Annotation of Upper Tanana Athabascan
Upper Tanana is an Athabascan language spoken in several communities in eastern Alaska and across the Canadian border in the Yukon Territory. With fewer than 100 speakers, the youngest being in their 40s, Upper Tanana is a highly endangered language. Most of the speakers are elders who generally do not use the language when non-speakers are present, and it is no longer used in church or other ritual contexts. Recently, several untranscribed recordings of Upper Tanana speakers made by linguist James Kari in the 1990s have been found in the Yukon Native Language Center. These will be transcribed and made available with the help of the remaining native speakers.
Jonathan David Bobaljik, David Koester, and Tatiana Degai - University of Connecticut / National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan / Itelmen Community
Itelmen Language Audio Recordings
The Itelmen language is the sole member of the Kamchatkan branch of Chukotko-Kamchatkan and is quite distinct from the Chukotkan languages in many ways. In the Itelmen population of 3,000, only 15 to 20 are fluent native speakers, scattered among various villages and the main city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskij, Russia. Although there is an official orthography, no native speakers are literate in Itelmen. Because there is a particular lack of multimedia material, the ELF award will be used to allow Tatiana Degai, a young member of the Itelmen community, to travel to two villages to collect recordings based on targeted elicitation lists constructed by Bobaljik, as well as to collect additional recordings, such as narratives of various sorts. The recordings will be used for language revitalization, archiving and pedagogy purposes.
Preservation of Sakuye Indigenous Language
Northern Kenya is home to the Sakuye community and four pastoralist communities of Somali origin. Sakuye culture is based on hunting and gathering, which helps sustain the language; pastoralist communities in northern Kenya speak Somali. A young generation has had to move into neighboring Ethiopia and then return after a peace agreement; they returned, however, with a different lifestyle, culture and language. This project will collect poems, oral narratives, songs, folklore, and other practices that surround marriage ceremony, ceremony for sacred areas, cultural festivals and some important Sakuye sayings and words. The collections will be preserved and circulated to the indigenous Sakuye community through media that reach all the four districts of northern Kenya.
Deborah Sanchez - Barbareño Chumash Council
Chumash Family Singers Recording Project
The Barbareño Chumash Council is a tribal group comprised of Chumash descendants of the greater Santa Barbara area. Some Council members participate in the Chumash Family Singers, a group that uses traditional native instruments and incorporates the Šmuwič (Barbareño Chumash) language into its material. The primary goal of this project is to create original Chumash songs in the Šmuwič language that can be shared with the Chumash community and the public. The planned recording would benefit Chumash community members who wish to learn songs, and would also encourage the regular use of the Šmuwič language through song.
Ana Carolina Hecht - University of Buenos Aires
Documentation of Language Socialization Practices in Intercultural School Contexts of Language Shift of Toba
The Toba Language (Guaycurú family) is spoken by an estimated 33,000 speakers both in Chaco, Formosa and Santa Fe Provinces as well as Gran Buenos Aires. The ELF award will be used to compare these two contexts, particularly the relationship between the treatment of languages in school projects developed among indigenous populations and the representations and uses of indigenous languages in educational processes inside (and outside) the scholastic setting. This research is important not only in academic terms but also in terms of the possibilities of designing educational public policies sensitive to the rights and identity of indigenous peoples.
Angoua Jean-Jacques Tano
Documentation and Description of Ivorian Sign Language
As in several countries in West Africa, at least two sign languages are used in the Ivory Coast. American Sign Language (ASL) is used in Deaf education and by educated Deaf adults; however deaf individuals with no formal schooling use various forms of Ivorian Sign Language or Langue des Signes de Côte d’Ivoire (LSCI). ASL is spreading within the Ivorian Deaf community at the cost of LSCI; more generally, the prominence of ASL in West Africa overshadows the local sign languages to such an extent that the latter are falling into disuse. This project is part of an effort to document and analyze LSCI in various parts of the Ivory Coast.
Annahita Farudi and Maziar Toosarvandani - University of Massachusetts / UC Berkeley
A Community-based Oral History Project for Zoroastrian Dari
Zoroastrian Dari (also called Zartoshti, Behdinˆani, or Gabri) is a Central Plateau language of the Northwestern subbranch of the Iranian language family (Indo-European). It is spoken by the Zoroastrian religious minority of Iran, primarily in and around the city of Yazd, and is distinct from the eponymous dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan. The 5,000 fluent speakers who remain are the last generation to grow up when the language was still the community’s primary mode of communication. This project will record the oral histories of elderly Zoroastrian residents of Yazd, documenting Dari as it was spoken before modernization, when the Zoroastrians of Yazd still lived in isolated agrarian communities.
Syngen Kanassatega - Mille Lacs Band Government Center
Ojibwe Cultural Activity Preservation
The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe (in Minnesota) estimates that only about 90 fluent speakers of remain of their variety of Ojibwe. The goal here is to assist in teaching future generations to be bilingual, preserving linguistic heritage while being proficient in English. The team will record traditional stories and songs about their history, spiritual wisdom, cultural activities, and life skills while they are being practiced, narrated, and explained by fluent speakers, elders, and adult mentors.