Language Legacies Grant Recipients - 2000
Alice J. Anderton - Intertribal Wordpath Society
Ponca Culture in Our Own Words
The Ponca language belongs to the Siouan linguistic family, which includes Dakota and Lakhota. It is spoken in the White Eagle tribal community, just south of Ponca City, in northern Oklahoma. Only about thirty fluent speakers remain, all in their 60s or older. The Ponca Language Arts Council (PLAC) has received repeated comments by Ponca students and teachers that they lack good materials for teaching the Ponca language, and that the traditional culture is being lost; the Intertribal Wordpath Society (IWS) has been granted an award to help improve this situation. IWS was founded in 1996 to promote the teaching, awareness, use, and status of Oklahoma Indian languages. As part of its mission to educate the public about native languages and assist in their preservation, IWS will produce five videotaped texts describing Ponca culture in the Ponca language. These video projects will be aired on its television show Wordpath, a public access cable program it produces on Cox Cable about Oklahoma Indian languages and those who preserve them. Researcher Alice Anderton will tape the texts in the Ponca/White Eagle area. Each VHS tape will be two hours long and contain 10-15 minutes of text in Ponca only, Ponca text with English subtitles, and Ponca text with Ponca subtitles. A translator, in consultation with the native speakers, will then produce a transcription and a literal and fluent translation. These will be in the form of five booklets to be distributed with the tapes. IWS will provide copies of the tapes to PLAC, Frontier High School, and the Ponca City Public Library. The research will provide samples of fully fluent conversational texts, a rarity for almost any Native American language, and make them available to students of Ponca and to the linguistic community for study. The tapes will document Ponca culture, teach and popularize the new official Ponca alphabet, and educate the general public about Ponca language and culture.
Mark J. Awakuni-Swetland - University of Nebraska
ELF Omaha Language Curriculum Development Project
Omaha is one of five languages in the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan language family. In 1994, the Omaha Tribe stated that less than 1% of its total enrollment were identified as fluent speakers of Omaha. It is reported that less than seventy elderly speakers of the language remain and that of these, only thirty use the language on a daily basis in the Macy area of Nebraska. There are several facilities that teach Omaha, namely the Macy Public school (recently renamed Omaha Nation Public School) and Nebraska Indian Community College. However, all suffer from the lack of a systematic curriculum, associated classroom materials, and native speakers trained in language instruction. NICC wishes to develop a more rigorous language curriculum, so as to provide their Omaha students with greater ability to transfer credits to other post-secondary institutions. The ELF Omaha Language Curriculum Development Project is a component of a larger collaborative effort to combat this problem. It proposes to support the development of language and culture lesson plans, craft culturally relevant immersion situations, and to produce language exercises, games, drills, and language lab audio tapes. The project will draw upon existing curriculum materials from NICC and Omaha Nation. Such materials will be collected and examined for linguistic and cultural content, placed into a larger four semester framework, and edited for content and consistency. New lessons will be generated to link existing lessons, as well as expand into new linguistic and sociocultural domains. Funds permitting, language lab tapes will be produced. The materials will be created with the assistance of Omaha native speakers residing in Macy, Lincoln, and Omaha, Nebraska. NICC and Omaha Nation will support the project by identifying and encouraging native speaker participants, publicizing the project within the Omaha community, providing office space for curriculum development work with the local speakers, contributing copies of current curriculum materials from their respective institutions, and assisting in the evaluation of such materials. Funds will be shared equally with the NICC and Omaha Nation, so as to bring direct benefit to the larger Omaha community at the K-12 and post-secondary levels.
Melissa Axelrod, Jule Gomez de Garcia, and Jordan Lachler - University of New Mexico
Plains Apache Language Documentation
The Plains Apaches, formally known as the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, are centered in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Plains Apache is one of the Apachean group of Athabaskan languages, and is part of the Na Dene family.
Today, there are only three elderly people who still speak the Plains Apache language. As a non-reservationist community, the Plains Apache are surrounded by English and other non-Apachean languages as diverse as Kiowa, Wichita, and Delaware. Children attend public school rather than an Apache Indian school, and do not speak the native language. It has been reported, however, that although no children speak the language, a few seem to understand it.
Tribal leaders and elders formed a committee in 1993 to help preserve the Plains Apache Tribe's cultural and linguistic heritage. The primary aim of the project was to produce documentation of the language, chiefly in the form of an interactive CD ROM dictionary. Axelrod, Garcia, and Lachler will act as consultants in completing the dictionary. In addition, they will continue research to aid the Plains Apache in language documentation. Their project will include a dictionary, a grammar, the videotaping of elders, and the publication of oral history and folklore. However, timing is urgent. Since their last visit, two of the most fluent Plains Apache speakers have passed away.
The research team will continue collecting data, primarily ancestor stories and oral history, from Mr. Chalepah Sr., a Plains Apache speaker with whom they have previously worked. They will conduct video and audio recordings. The team also hopes to locate the other known fluent speaker and to search for other speakers and rememberers of the language. They will work with the community to transcribe and analyze the stories they have gathered. These materials will be formatted for community use.
The research, aside from offering great benefits to the Plains Apache community, will also permit comparative research on Apachean languages and on the Na Dene family in general.
Frank Bechter and Stephen Hibbard - University of Chicago
Apsaalooke Textual And Gestural Form: Videorecording Crow and Plains Sign Talk Narratives
The Crow language is spoken by roughly four-thousand people in southeastern Montana (about half the registered Crow population), while only 10% of the Crow children are acquiring the language today. Traditionally, most Crow speakers would also be fluent in "Plains Sign Talk" (PST). PST is a manual semiotic code that was once a lingua franca in widespread use among the Crow and other Plains Indian nations. This communicative system, however, is clearly moribund, with probably fewer than 100 proficient speakers, all elderly. We now have one last chance to see how conventions in PST may have affected storytelling ad other techniques in spoken Crow.
Bechter and Hibbard will spend one week in Pryor, MT on the Crow Reservation collecting traditional and non-traditional narratives in Crow and PST. These narratives will be recorded in font of Crow-speaking audiences. The researchers expect to document gestural forms (if not PST forms) in informal discourse as well. Crow consultants will aid in producing Crow transcriptions and English translations of narratives. The resulting materials will consist of audiovisual data, Crow transcription, and English transcription interposed on separate digital tracks.
The project will yield a high-quality, composite audio-visual and textual archive of Crow and PST narrative data. This will not only benefit researchers, but will aid in language preservation and revitalization projects. One copy of the archive will be donated to the Crow Agency Bilingual Education Program. Another copy will be available for researchers through the Language Archives at the University of Chicago.
Barry F. Carlson and Suzanne Cook - University of Victoria
Lacandon Text Collection
Lacandon is currently spoken by a dwindling population of Mayas. Their ancestry has been obscured by the absence of a written tradition, and their primary source of culture, the Lacandon story-teller, has been threatened by the influence of multimedia technology such as television. As technology advances and the remaining story-tellers grow older and fewer, the state of the Lacandon traditional culture, rich with pre-Columbian verbal art, is in increasing jeopardy.
Given the imminent extinction of the Lacandon culture in Middle America, work needs to be done to document the oral performances, for the sake of their preservation and for future linguistic analyses. Carlson and Cook will record traditional narratives, songs, and ceremonies performed by the Lacandon story-tellers and religious practitioners in the northern community of Naja in Mexico. Personal narratives and conversations will also be recorded in order to document the full range of Lacandon discourse genres.
The collection of audio and video recordings of oral performances will serve a variety of purposes. Primarily, it preserves the Lacandon oral culture against further loss, but also will provide materials for possible future language renewal projects. The research will augment earlier grammatical information, while adding the new dimension of audio/video analysis of oral performance previously unstudied by linguists. In addition, the oral performances may be compiled into a collection of Lacandon texts. These performances will add to the growing body of research on Native American ethnopoetics.
G. Tucker Childs and M Djibril Batchily - Portland State University
Fieldwork on Mmani (Atlantic, Niger-Congo), a dying language of coastal Guinea-Conakry
Mmani is the northernmost language of the Bullom family of the Mel sub-group of languages, belonging to the Atlantic Group Niger-Congo. Its speakers are located on the southernmost coast of Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. Investigation has revealed that there are several villages of speakers on the islands off the coast, as well, one of which is now accessible by ferry.
Mmani is geographically swamped and surrounded by Susu (a distantly related language) and interpenetrated with Temne (a genetically related language in the Mel sub-group). It has been reported that there are very few speakers left, at most a few hundred, and there are no speakers under 60 years old.
Childs suspects that Mmani is not a dialect of Bullom, as it has been recently regarded. Instead, he believes that Mmani is at least a widely divergent dialect, if not a separate language. Currently there is no work being done on the language, and previous research has yielded little documentation and no sound recordings.
Childs and Batchily plan to document and describe the Mmani language to the extent possible given its current status and available time (two months). Research will include making recordings, digitizing the speech for archiving, accumulating a word list and examples of different discourse types, and writing/sketching a grammar. The investigation of Mmani will chronicle a once distinct language and culture, and it will contribute to a greater understanding of the Atlantic group of languages as a whole.
Terry Crowley - University of Waikato
Moribund languages of northern Malakula
The island of Malakula, the second largest island in the Republic of Vanuatu in the southwestern Pacific, currently holds over two dozen separate Oceanic languages spoken by a population of under 30,000 in total. In spite of this linguistic diversity, however, the original number of languages is thought to have been much higher, possibly one third of them having become lost or moribund due to contact with European labor recruiters, traders, and missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Crowley recently discovered that the Langalanga and Marakhus languages, previously assumed to be extinct, do in fact have a small number of speakers scattered through a number of villages. In addition, he was informed that a previously unreported language originally spoken in the Khabtol area of central Malakula also has a small number of speakers remaining. These languages are only spoken by older members of the community, who speak other local vernaculars as their primary languages; they are not being passed on to younger generations. This is our last chance to record them so that descendants may appreciate, in part, what has been lost.
Crowley will survey the central and northern areas of Malakula in order to locate the remaining speakers of these three moribund languages, and to record as much linguistic data as possible from these speakers. He will use Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu, to complete his research. Data most likely will include lexical information, elicited sentence material to indicate structural outlines of the languages, and narrative textual data transcribed from tape recordings. The latter will not only complement the elicited structural material, but also allow for the recording of the oral tradition, which will be of particular interest and value to the communities involved. Since these languages are all completely undocumented, Crowley's data will also be of great value to linguistic typologists and to historical linguists.
Linda A. Cumberland -Indiana University
A Grammar of Assiniboine
Cumberland plans to develop a descriptive grammar of Assiniboine, a Siouan language of the northern plains, now only spoken by a small number of elders in Saskatchewan and Montana. The grammar will focus on phonology, morphology, syntax, and usage, including gendered speech, register, and generational and regional variation. The goal of the project is to provide a broad description of the major grammatical processes of Assiniboine that will serve as a resource for the Assiniboine communities in Canada and the U.S. in their language revitalization programs. Also, the project will serve as a resource for future, more detailed formal linguistic analyses and comparisons to other Siouan languages.
Taking a traditional anthropological linguistics approach, Cumberland will first construct a rudimentary outline of the grammar from previously gathered materials prior to entering the field. The following fieldwork will include daily one-on-one elicitation sessions over an initial period of three months. During this time a language committee of speakers will be chosen to serve as the major resource of material in the following nine months of study. This committee will meet to discuss separate cultural domains, each meeting recorded on audiotape. Significant portions of the meetings will be transcribed later in one-on-one sessions with committee members. The recordings will ultimately be archived with other Assinibione materials at the American Indian Studies Research Institute (AISRI). In addition, Cumberland and the committee will take "field trips" of varying lengths to sites of historical and cultural importance to the speakers, in hopes of eliciting dormant linguistic knowledge via immersion.
Currently only one hundred and thirty Assiniboines are considered fluent speakers out of a total population of 3500, and most of these fluent speakers are over the age of seventy. There are at least three centers actively attempting to revitalize the language. However, no systematic description of the grammar exists.
Theodore Isham -Mvskoke Language Institute
Language Immersion Camps in Mvskoke (Creek)
Immersion in a language environment is one of the most successful techniques in language learning. Isham, of the Mvskoke Language Institute in Oklahoma, used a grant from the ELF to start a program with current members of the Muscogee Nation. Workshops were held in the summer of 2000, involving language learners at all levels and ages. The current status of the Muscogee language is that approximately 11% of the population who live in Oklahoma fluently speak the language on a regular basis. Another 3% understand the language and speak it occasionally, while approximately 1% has knowledge of the language but are uncomfortable speaking due to unavailability of conversational partners. At present there are approximately 48,000 citizens enrolled in the tribe, 28,000 of whom live in Oklahoma. Most of the fluent speakers are elderly, a feature common to many endangered languages. The immersion program used as many media as were available--audio recordings, videotapes, written material and cultural material. It is hoped that the immersion camps will create a better environment for the use of the language by a larger number of casual users, and eventually the acquisition of the language by young children. Further, videotapes of the older generation speaking in the heritage language will be treasured by their descendants for even more generations.
Linda Jordan -University of Oklahoma
Cherokee Storytelling Project
The Cherokees comprise the largest Native American group in North America. It is estimated that there are between 10,000 and 15,000 native speakers of Cherokee, an Iroquoian language. The majority of these speakers reside in Oklahoma. Cherokee is not considered in imminent danger of extinction. It is a threatened language, however, as the majority of its speakers are elders. There is pressure on children who do possess the language to acquire primary fluency in English. Unless swift, comprehensive action is taken, the language will not survive the next century. A number of pedagogical materials have been generated within the Cherokee community, including children's books and classroom materials. There is also a rich linguistic literature and an excellent dictionary and grammar. However, there is a great need for sophisticated, text-based materials for both older children and adults who are striving to recover their language. Ideally, these texts will be grounded within the history and culture of the Cherokee community. Jordan will address this need through the recording of storytelling in Cherokee. The researchers plan to provide materials that incorporate recordings, a substantial text in both the Syllabary and Cherokee phonetics, an artful translation into English, word-by-word translation into English, close morphological analysis, minimal discourse analysis, and separate grammars specific to each story. The materials will be compiled with frequent consultation with the Cherokee community. Copies will be made of all materials for deposit in the Vaughan library of Northeastern State University, other public facilities in Eastern Oklahoma, and the offices of the Endangered Languages Fund at Yale University. The project will aid community members in learning the art of storytelling, which is an effective method of language preservation when community-based and culturally accurate. It will ensure detailed analysis is immediately available to any serious student of language; in particular, it will allow teachers easy, free access to more sophisticated materials for advanced students. Further, the research will provide large segments of speech entirely controlled by the speaker, which has not been collected previously, and will yield rich information about Cherokee syntax and phonology. The recordings and texts will be of particular use to scholars working on discourse analysis, as well as sociolinguists.
Eva Toulouze and Kaur Maegi - Tartu University
Recording and Analyzing Forest Nenets Language Materials
The Forest Nenets are a semi-nomadic group of people inhabiting northern Russia. They have no written language and little linguistic description, and although clearly related to their more northern neighbors, the Tundra Nenets, their language differs enough to deny mutual understanding. Nor are the Forest Nenets recognized officially as a single ethnic group, as they live in two different administrative areas. In addition, the Forest Nenets' territory has been occupied since the late 1960s by the oil industry, which has damaged the natural and human environment of all the indigenous people. As a result, the language and culture is seriously threatened.
Currently only a few elders have a rich knowledge of both everyday language and traditional oral folklore. The middle-aged population uses the native tongue as a means of everyday communication among themselves and with the elderly, but little is passed on to the younger generations.
Since Forest Nenets is endangered in its physical as well as in its cultural existence, and since it is only marginally known in the academic community, Toulouze and MŠgi plan to concentrate on two goals: fieldwork collection of language materials and establishment of a scientifically justified transcription of Forest Nenets for use as a written language. The latter will be used in the community in hopes of stimulating more interest in the language and culture.
Toulouze and MŠgi will record folklore, as well as spontaneous daily conversation, in two regions of Russia: the Agan and Num-to regions. The researchers will conduct fieldwork in both regions for two months, eliciting audio/video digital recordings which will ultimately be given to the National Museum of Estonia. After the systematization and analysis of the recorded material, Toulouze and MŠgi will prepare various materials with community leader Juri Vella for use by the Forest Nenets.
Ponca Culture in Our Own Words
The Ponca language belongs to the Siouan linguistic family, which includes Dakota and Lakhota. It is spoken in the White Eagle tribal community, just south of Ponca City, in northern Oklahoma. Only about thirty fluent speakers remain, all in their 60s or older. The Ponca Language Arts Council (PLAC) has received repeated comments by Ponca students and teachers that they lack good materials for teaching the Ponca language, and that the traditional culture is being lost; the Intertribal Wordpath Society (IWS) has been granted an award to help improve this situation. IWS was founded in 1996 to promote the teaching, awareness, use, and status of Oklahoma Indian languages. As part of its mission to educate the public about native languages and assist in their preservation, IWS will produce five videotaped texts describing Ponca culture in the Ponca language. These video projects will be aired on its television show Wordpath, a public access cable program it produces on Cox Cable about Oklahoma Indian languages and those who preserve them. Researcher Alice Anderton will tape the texts in the Ponca/White Eagle area. Each VHS tape will be two hours long and contain 10-15 minutes of text in Ponca only, Ponca text with English subtitles, and Ponca text with Ponca subtitles. A translator, in consultation with the native speakers, will then produce a transcription and a literal and fluent translation. These will be in the form of five booklets to be distributed with the tapes. IWS will provide copies of the tapes to PLAC, Frontier High School, and the Ponca City Public Library. The research will provide samples of fully fluent conversational texts, a rarity for almost any Native American language, and make them available to students of Ponca and to the linguistic community for study. The tapes will document Ponca culture, teach and popularize the new official Ponca alphabet, and educate the general public about Ponca language and culture.
Mark J. Awakuni-Swetland - University of Nebraska
ELF Omaha Language Curriculum Development Project
Omaha is one of five languages in the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan language family. In 1994, the Omaha Tribe stated that less than 1% of its total enrollment were identified as fluent speakers of Omaha. It is reported that less than seventy elderly speakers of the language remain and that of these, only thirty use the language on a daily basis in the Macy area of Nebraska. There are several facilities that teach Omaha, namely the Macy Public school (recently renamed Omaha Nation Public School) and Nebraska Indian Community College. However, all suffer from the lack of a systematic curriculum, associated classroom materials, and native speakers trained in language instruction. NICC wishes to develop a more rigorous language curriculum, so as to provide their Omaha students with greater ability to transfer credits to other post-secondary institutions. The ELF Omaha Language Curriculum Development Project is a component of a larger collaborative effort to combat this problem. It proposes to support the development of language and culture lesson plans, craft culturally relevant immersion situations, and to produce language exercises, games, drills, and language lab audio tapes. The project will draw upon existing curriculum materials from NICC and Omaha Nation. Such materials will be collected and examined for linguistic and cultural content, placed into a larger four semester framework, and edited for content and consistency. New lessons will be generated to link existing lessons, as well as expand into new linguistic and sociocultural domains. Funds permitting, language lab tapes will be produced. The materials will be created with the assistance of Omaha native speakers residing in Macy, Lincoln, and Omaha, Nebraska. NICC and Omaha Nation will support the project by identifying and encouraging native speaker participants, publicizing the project within the Omaha community, providing office space for curriculum development work with the local speakers, contributing copies of current curriculum materials from their respective institutions, and assisting in the evaluation of such materials. Funds will be shared equally with the NICC and Omaha Nation, so as to bring direct benefit to the larger Omaha community at the K-12 and post-secondary levels.
Melissa Axelrod, Jule Gomez de Garcia, and Jordan Lachler - University of New Mexico
Plains Apache Language Documentation
The Plains Apaches, formally known as the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, are centered in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Plains Apache is one of the Apachean group of Athabaskan languages, and is part of the Na Dene family.
Today, there are only three elderly people who still speak the Plains Apache language. As a non-reservationist community, the Plains Apache are surrounded by English and other non-Apachean languages as diverse as Kiowa, Wichita, and Delaware. Children attend public school rather than an Apache Indian school, and do not speak the native language. It has been reported, however, that although no children speak the language, a few seem to understand it.
Tribal leaders and elders formed a committee in 1993 to help preserve the Plains Apache Tribe's cultural and linguistic heritage. The primary aim of the project was to produce documentation of the language, chiefly in the form of an interactive CD ROM dictionary. Axelrod, Garcia, and Lachler will act as consultants in completing the dictionary. In addition, they will continue research to aid the Plains Apache in language documentation. Their project will include a dictionary, a grammar, the videotaping of elders, and the publication of oral history and folklore. However, timing is urgent. Since their last visit, two of the most fluent Plains Apache speakers have passed away.
The research team will continue collecting data, primarily ancestor stories and oral history, from Mr. Chalepah Sr., a Plains Apache speaker with whom they have previously worked. They will conduct video and audio recordings. The team also hopes to locate the other known fluent speaker and to search for other speakers and rememberers of the language. They will work with the community to transcribe and analyze the stories they have gathered. These materials will be formatted for community use.
The research, aside from offering great benefits to the Plains Apache community, will also permit comparative research on Apachean languages and on the Na Dene family in general.
Frank Bechter and Stephen Hibbard - University of Chicago
Apsaalooke Textual And Gestural Form: Videorecording Crow and Plains Sign Talk Narratives
The Crow language is spoken by roughly four-thousand people in southeastern Montana (about half the registered Crow population), while only 10% of the Crow children are acquiring the language today. Traditionally, most Crow speakers would also be fluent in "Plains Sign Talk" (PST). PST is a manual semiotic code that was once a lingua franca in widespread use among the Crow and other Plains Indian nations. This communicative system, however, is clearly moribund, with probably fewer than 100 proficient speakers, all elderly. We now have one last chance to see how conventions in PST may have affected storytelling ad other techniques in spoken Crow.
Bechter and Hibbard will spend one week in Pryor, MT on the Crow Reservation collecting traditional and non-traditional narratives in Crow and PST. These narratives will be recorded in font of Crow-speaking audiences. The researchers expect to document gestural forms (if not PST forms) in informal discourse as well. Crow consultants will aid in producing Crow transcriptions and English translations of narratives. The resulting materials will consist of audiovisual data, Crow transcription, and English transcription interposed on separate digital tracks.
The project will yield a high-quality, composite audio-visual and textual archive of Crow and PST narrative data. This will not only benefit researchers, but will aid in language preservation and revitalization projects. One copy of the archive will be donated to the Crow Agency Bilingual Education Program. Another copy will be available for researchers through the Language Archives at the University of Chicago.
Barry F. Carlson and Suzanne Cook - University of Victoria
Lacandon Text Collection
Lacandon is currently spoken by a dwindling population of Mayas. Their ancestry has been obscured by the absence of a written tradition, and their primary source of culture, the Lacandon story-teller, has been threatened by the influence of multimedia technology such as television. As technology advances and the remaining story-tellers grow older and fewer, the state of the Lacandon traditional culture, rich with pre-Columbian verbal art, is in increasing jeopardy.
Given the imminent extinction of the Lacandon culture in Middle America, work needs to be done to document the oral performances, for the sake of their preservation and for future linguistic analyses. Carlson and Cook will record traditional narratives, songs, and ceremonies performed by the Lacandon story-tellers and religious practitioners in the northern community of Naja in Mexico. Personal narratives and conversations will also be recorded in order to document the full range of Lacandon discourse genres.
The collection of audio and video recordings of oral performances will serve a variety of purposes. Primarily, it preserves the Lacandon oral culture against further loss, but also will provide materials for possible future language renewal projects. The research will augment earlier grammatical information, while adding the new dimension of audio/video analysis of oral performance previously unstudied by linguists. In addition, the oral performances may be compiled into a collection of Lacandon texts. These performances will add to the growing body of research on Native American ethnopoetics.
G. Tucker Childs and M Djibril Batchily - Portland State University
Fieldwork on Mmani (Atlantic, Niger-Congo), a dying language of coastal Guinea-Conakry
Mmani is the northernmost language of the Bullom family of the Mel sub-group of languages, belonging to the Atlantic Group Niger-Congo. Its speakers are located on the southernmost coast of Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. Investigation has revealed that there are several villages of speakers on the islands off the coast, as well, one of which is now accessible by ferry.
Mmani is geographically swamped and surrounded by Susu (a distantly related language) and interpenetrated with Temne (a genetically related language in the Mel sub-group). It has been reported that there are very few speakers left, at most a few hundred, and there are no speakers under 60 years old.
Childs suspects that Mmani is not a dialect of Bullom, as it has been recently regarded. Instead, he believes that Mmani is at least a widely divergent dialect, if not a separate language. Currently there is no work being done on the language, and previous research has yielded little documentation and no sound recordings.
Childs and Batchily plan to document and describe the Mmani language to the extent possible given its current status and available time (two months). Research will include making recordings, digitizing the speech for archiving, accumulating a word list and examples of different discourse types, and writing/sketching a grammar. The investigation of Mmani will chronicle a once distinct language and culture, and it will contribute to a greater understanding of the Atlantic group of languages as a whole.
Terry Crowley - University of Waikato
Moribund languages of northern Malakula
The island of Malakula, the second largest island in the Republic of Vanuatu in the southwestern Pacific, currently holds over two dozen separate Oceanic languages spoken by a population of under 30,000 in total. In spite of this linguistic diversity, however, the original number of languages is thought to have been much higher, possibly one third of them having become lost or moribund due to contact with European labor recruiters, traders, and missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Crowley recently discovered that the Langalanga and Marakhus languages, previously assumed to be extinct, do in fact have a small number of speakers scattered through a number of villages. In addition, he was informed that a previously unreported language originally spoken in the Khabtol area of central Malakula also has a small number of speakers remaining. These languages are only spoken by older members of the community, who speak other local vernaculars as their primary languages; they are not being passed on to younger generations. This is our last chance to record them so that descendants may appreciate, in part, what has been lost.
Crowley will survey the central and northern areas of Malakula in order to locate the remaining speakers of these three moribund languages, and to record as much linguistic data as possible from these speakers. He will use Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu, to complete his research. Data most likely will include lexical information, elicited sentence material to indicate structural outlines of the languages, and narrative textual data transcribed from tape recordings. The latter will not only complement the elicited structural material, but also allow for the recording of the oral tradition, which will be of particular interest and value to the communities involved. Since these languages are all completely undocumented, Crowley's data will also be of great value to linguistic typologists and to historical linguists.
Linda A. Cumberland -Indiana University
A Grammar of Assiniboine
Cumberland plans to develop a descriptive grammar of Assiniboine, a Siouan language of the northern plains, now only spoken by a small number of elders in Saskatchewan and Montana. The grammar will focus on phonology, morphology, syntax, and usage, including gendered speech, register, and generational and regional variation. The goal of the project is to provide a broad description of the major grammatical processes of Assiniboine that will serve as a resource for the Assiniboine communities in Canada and the U.S. in their language revitalization programs. Also, the project will serve as a resource for future, more detailed formal linguistic analyses and comparisons to other Siouan languages.
Taking a traditional anthropological linguistics approach, Cumberland will first construct a rudimentary outline of the grammar from previously gathered materials prior to entering the field. The following fieldwork will include daily one-on-one elicitation sessions over an initial period of three months. During this time a language committee of speakers will be chosen to serve as the major resource of material in the following nine months of study. This committee will meet to discuss separate cultural domains, each meeting recorded on audiotape. Significant portions of the meetings will be transcribed later in one-on-one sessions with committee members. The recordings will ultimately be archived with other Assinibione materials at the American Indian Studies Research Institute (AISRI). In addition, Cumberland and the committee will take "field trips" of varying lengths to sites of historical and cultural importance to the speakers, in hopes of eliciting dormant linguistic knowledge via immersion.
Currently only one hundred and thirty Assiniboines are considered fluent speakers out of a total population of 3500, and most of these fluent speakers are over the age of seventy. There are at least three centers actively attempting to revitalize the language. However, no systematic description of the grammar exists.
Theodore Isham -Mvskoke Language Institute
Language Immersion Camps in Mvskoke (Creek)
Immersion in a language environment is one of the most successful techniques in language learning. Isham, of the Mvskoke Language Institute in Oklahoma, used a grant from the ELF to start a program with current members of the Muscogee Nation. Workshops were held in the summer of 2000, involving language learners at all levels and ages. The current status of the Muscogee language is that approximately 11% of the population who live in Oklahoma fluently speak the language on a regular basis. Another 3% understand the language and speak it occasionally, while approximately 1% has knowledge of the language but are uncomfortable speaking due to unavailability of conversational partners. At present there are approximately 48,000 citizens enrolled in the tribe, 28,000 of whom live in Oklahoma. Most of the fluent speakers are elderly, a feature common to many endangered languages. The immersion program used as many media as were available--audio recordings, videotapes, written material and cultural material. It is hoped that the immersion camps will create a better environment for the use of the language by a larger number of casual users, and eventually the acquisition of the language by young children. Further, videotapes of the older generation speaking in the heritage language will be treasured by their descendants for even more generations.
Linda Jordan -University of Oklahoma
Cherokee Storytelling Project
The Cherokees comprise the largest Native American group in North America. It is estimated that there are between 10,000 and 15,000 native speakers of Cherokee, an Iroquoian language. The majority of these speakers reside in Oklahoma. Cherokee is not considered in imminent danger of extinction. It is a threatened language, however, as the majority of its speakers are elders. There is pressure on children who do possess the language to acquire primary fluency in English. Unless swift, comprehensive action is taken, the language will not survive the next century. A number of pedagogical materials have been generated within the Cherokee community, including children's books and classroom materials. There is also a rich linguistic literature and an excellent dictionary and grammar. However, there is a great need for sophisticated, text-based materials for both older children and adults who are striving to recover their language. Ideally, these texts will be grounded within the history and culture of the Cherokee community. Jordan will address this need through the recording of storytelling in Cherokee. The researchers plan to provide materials that incorporate recordings, a substantial text in both the Syllabary and Cherokee phonetics, an artful translation into English, word-by-word translation into English, close morphological analysis, minimal discourse analysis, and separate grammars specific to each story. The materials will be compiled with frequent consultation with the Cherokee community. Copies will be made of all materials for deposit in the Vaughan library of Northeastern State University, other public facilities in Eastern Oklahoma, and the offices of the Endangered Languages Fund at Yale University. The project will aid community members in learning the art of storytelling, which is an effective method of language preservation when community-based and culturally accurate. It will ensure detailed analysis is immediately available to any serious student of language; in particular, it will allow teachers easy, free access to more sophisticated materials for advanced students. Further, the research will provide large segments of speech entirely controlled by the speaker, which has not been collected previously, and will yield rich information about Cherokee syntax and phonology. The recordings and texts will be of particular use to scholars working on discourse analysis, as well as sociolinguists.
Eva Toulouze and Kaur Maegi - Tartu University
Recording and Analyzing Forest Nenets Language Materials
The Forest Nenets are a semi-nomadic group of people inhabiting northern Russia. They have no written language and little linguistic description, and although clearly related to their more northern neighbors, the Tundra Nenets, their language differs enough to deny mutual understanding. Nor are the Forest Nenets recognized officially as a single ethnic group, as they live in two different administrative areas. In addition, the Forest Nenets' territory has been occupied since the late 1960s by the oil industry, which has damaged the natural and human environment of all the indigenous people. As a result, the language and culture is seriously threatened.
Currently only a few elders have a rich knowledge of both everyday language and traditional oral folklore. The middle-aged population uses the native tongue as a means of everyday communication among themselves and with the elderly, but little is passed on to the younger generations.
Since Forest Nenets is endangered in its physical as well as in its cultural existence, and since it is only marginally known in the academic community, Toulouze and MŠgi plan to concentrate on two goals: fieldwork collection of language materials and establishment of a scientifically justified transcription of Forest Nenets for use as a written language. The latter will be used in the community in hopes of stimulating more interest in the language and culture.
Toulouze and MŠgi will record folklore, as well as spontaneous daily conversation, in two regions of Russia: the Agan and Num-to regions. The researchers will conduct fieldwork in both regions for two months, eliciting audio/video digital recordings which will ultimately be given to the National Museum of Estonia. After the systematization and analysis of the recorded material, Toulouze and MŠgi will prepare various materials with community leader Juri Vella for use by the Forest Nenets.
