Language Legacies Grant Recipients - 2022
[MKARL] = MKARL Funding
[IPA] = International Phonetic Association Funding
Teresa Rodriguez Campos and Carolina Rodriguez Alzza “Documentación de las narraciones sobre la cultura material Iskonawa” (“Documentation of narratives about Iskonawa material culture”)
El Iskonawa es una lengua de la Amazonía peruana que se encuentra en serio peligro de extinción. Sin embargo, en la última década, las nuevas generaciones de jóvenes y adultos vienen realizando esfuerzos para la documentación y la revitalización de su lengua y, a través de ella, de sus prácticas culturales. El financiamiento del The Endangered Language Fund permitirá la continuación de estos esfuerzos mediante la documentación de narraciones sobre la cultura material Iskonawa. Este proyecto se propone registrar audiovisualmente narraciones que den cuenta de los procedimientos para elaborar telas pintadas, cerámicas, cestas y flechas. La documentación será conducida por las mujeres de la Asociación de Artesanas Iskonawa Pari Awin y participarán como narradores tanto ancianos como adultos Iskonawa. El resultado será una colección de narraciones que se alojarán en Youtube para compartirlas con la población Iskonawa como un material que contribuya a la revitalización de la lengua.
(Iskonawa is a language from the Peruvian Amazon that is in serious danger of extinction. However, in the last decade, new generations of young people and adults have been making efforts to document and revitalize their language and, through it, their cultural practices. Funding from The Endangered Language Fund will allow these efforts to continue through the documentation of narratives about Iskonawa material culture. This project intends to record audiovisual narratives that account for the procedures to make painted fabrics, ceramics, baskets and arrows. The documentation will be conducted by the women of the Iskonawa Pari Awin Artisans Association and both Iskonawa elders and adults will participate as narrators. The result will be a collection of stories that will be hosted on YouTube to be shared with the Iskonawa population as material that contributes to the revitalization of the language.)
Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi “Diccionario en formato de aplicación para celular en lengua Kulina-Pano” (“Dictionary for cell phone apps in the Kulina-Pano language”) [MKARL]
Kulina-Pano es un idioma en peligro de extinción, que es hablado por unos 30 ancianos (principalmente mujeres ancianas) que viven entre los Matsés en la Amazonía en Perú y Brasil. Este proyecto documentará el idioma Kulina-Pano con grabaciones de audio de entrevistas y narrativas con los últimos hablantes de este idioma en pueblos Matsés (departamento Loreto, Perú). Los productos finales serán un diccionario Kulina-Matsés-Español en forma de aplicación interactiva para celular, ilustrado con dibujos y con audio. Este será el primer material producido para la revitalización de Kulina-Pano. Además, las grabaciones serán archivadas en el archivo digital del Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (Iquitos Perú). Kulina-Pano es reconocido en Brasil como idioma originario, pero aún no por el gobierno peruano, así parte de este proyecto será solicitar al ministerio de cultura del Perú que reconozca este idioma y dé prioridad a su revitalización.
(Kulina-Pano is an endangered language, spoken by about 30 elders (mainly elderly women) who live among the Matsés in the Amazon in Peru and Brazil. This project will document the Kulina-Pano language with audio recordings of interviews and narratives with the last speakers of this language in Matsés peoples (Loreto department, Peru). The final products will be a Kulina-Matsés-Spanish dictionary in the form of an interactive mobile application, illustrated with drawings and audio. This will be the first material produced for the revitalization of Kulina-Pano. In addition, the recordings will be archived in the digital archive of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon (Iquitos Peru). Kulina-Pano is recognized in Brazil as an original language, but not yet by the Peruvian government, so part of this project will be to request the Peruvian Ministry of Culture to recognize this language and prioritize its revitalization.)
Federico Falletti “Sengwer dictionary and storybook” [MKARL]
Sengwer is an endangered language of a traditionally indigenous hunter-gatherer forest people, which now live in small communities dispersed between three Kenyan counties (Trans-Nzoia, Elgeyo-Marakwet and West-Pokot). This projects aims to create a multilingual (English/Swahili/Sengwer) dictionary for the Sengwer language and a primary-school level storybook to aid language literacy and conservation. The orthography for both will be based on the on-going Bible translation to ensure consistency as well as continued community approval. The dictionary will have two formats: (1) one will be printed and distributed in schools and cultural centres where the community lives and (2) the other will be online, part of the open-source “Living Dictionaries” language documentation and conservation initiative, which will included phonetic transcriptions and audio-visual information for each entry. The dictionary and the storybook were commissioned by representatives of Sengwer and will be written and reviewed in tight- collaboration with young and old community members.
Bai Jianqiong and Nathaniel Sims “Yonghe Qiang digital dictionary project”
This application proposes a collaborative project by Bai Jianqiong and Dr. Nathaniel Sims to create a multilingual, Qiang- Chinese-English digital dictionary for the under-described and endangered Yonghe variety of Qiang (ISO qxs) (Tibeto-Burman/Trans-Himalayan). Yonghe is spoken by approximately 5,000 residents of Yonghe Township, Mao County, Aba Qiang-Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China. The dictionary will be made publicly available via the Lexica series of the Pangloss archive. It will focus on certain lexical domains that are particularly endangered, including names of local flora and fauna, kinship terms, and ritual language. Entries will include phonetic and phonological and morphosyntactic information, with definitions in Chinese and English. Each entry will be replete with an example sentence presented in Qiang with inter-linear glossed and translated illustrating sentences.
Jacob Kodner “Developing a Manchu dictionary and acoustic corpus” [MKARL]
The goal of this project is to collaborate with native speakers of Manchu to film an oral history and expand an online, recorded dictionary already created by the lead researcher and the speaker community. The oral history will be transcribed in Manchu, translated in English and Mandarin, and then interlinearized in English and Mandarin as well. The oral history video, accompanying documentation, and expanded dictionary will all be housed at a single location: "Mini Buleku", a website developed by the lead researcher for the community of Manchu speakers. It is the hope that the oral history and dictionary produced will serve as educational resources to promote the learning and revival of the language. The data collected will also provide fairly comprehensive acoustic and video data on the sound system of Manchu—data that can be used to create an IPA illustration for the language and contribute to ongoing documentation efforts.
Iara Mantenuto and Valencia Teems “Narratives in San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec” [IPA]
This project is part of a long-term collaborative effort to document and revitalize San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec (ISO: mks), a language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. The proposal supports the collection, videorecording, transcription, translation, editing, formatting, analysis, and publication of stories from elderly members of the community. We plan to obtain not only documentation and linguistic information about the language in narratives, but also printed material for our literacy workshops for the young members of the community. We will also organize an event for the community where we are going to share the results of this work in addition to the three children's books we are currently creating. The event will celebrate the first published written material in this language. The material will also be made available on a website online, and the linguistics analysis, together with the rest of the material will be archived in the California Language Archive.
Patricia Nora Riget “JA ATA BIDUNDAN: A Bidayuh storytelling project”
The researchers plan to produce a collection of Bidayuh folktales with their translations in English and Malay. This collection will be made accessible to both the Bidayuhs and the general public via the Dayak Bidayuh National Association (DBNA) and Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya’s forthcoming indigenous language website/platform. The print copy of the storybooks will be distributed as teaching materials to teachers teaching in the Bidayuh’s Playschool or Sikurah Piramin under the Multilingual Education (MLE) project in the Bidayuh villages. The project will aid community members, particularly the younger generations in learning the folktales and the art of storytelling, which is an effective method of language preservation when community-based and culturally explicit. The recordings and texts will be of particular use to scholars working on indigenous literature as well as sociolinguists working on oral folk narrative.
Konrad Rybka “Atorad language camp”
Atorad is an underdocumented, undescribed Arawakan language of Guyana with only four speakers. The four Atorad live in different villages of the Wapichan people speaking another Arawakan language and have not had opportunities to speak Atorad in years. This project will bring them together for a one-week-long language camp to stimulate their Atorad language skill and kick off documentation efforts. The speakers will engage in story-telling, conversations, and elicitation, including sessions using as stimulus the existing, albeit scant and unannotated, Atorad recordings and photographs of Atorad museum objects. All sessions will be archived with the community and the California Language Archive. The project will significantly expand on the extant documentation, contribute to the description of Atorad and the contextualization of Atorad collections. It will also contribute to training local documentation specialists by involving a Wapichan-speaking trainee, building capacity for independent language work in the area where several languages are threatened.
Maaz Shaikh “Documentation of Zangskar Tibetan or Zangskari” [MKARL]
Zangskar Tibetan, or more commonly Zangskari, is an endangered and un(der)documented variety of Tibetan spoken in the Zangskar valley of Ladakh, India. Estimates for the number of Zangskari speakers range from 5,000 to 11,400. The numbers may be perhaps alarming, but what’s more unfortunate is the rate of language attrition of Zangskari to (Leh) Ladakhi due to various reasons. No proper and focused documentation or description of Zangskari has been done so far except for some very preliminary works. For the project funded by the ELF grant, I intend to (1) Produce an annotated digital corpus of approximately two hours of texts in Zangskari, (2) Archiving this corpus and dissemination of results as published papers, and (3) Organize a workshop targeted to train young Zangskaris to document their elders’ speech and archive their collection as well. My long-term goals are to complete a comprehensive documentation and revitalization of Zangskari.
David Shanks “Possession in Southern Tutchone”
Southern Tutchone is a critically endangered Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in the Southern Yukon. With around 40 speakers with an average age of 60 as of 2010, documentation of the language is vital for the revitalization and future of Southern Tutchone. This project will consist of linguistic fieldwork in Whitehorse, Yukon followed by analysis at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The primary methodology will be elicitation of Southern Tutchone speech from two consultants. The analysis will focus on the possessive system, with three major theoretical goals: to analyze the tonal system, which is an important part of possession; to investigate the syntax of possession, comparing it to other Dene languages; and to propose a semantic analysis of possession. This project has been developed with input from community members and aims to both provide linguistic material for future pedagogical materials and strengthen connections between researchers and Southern Tutchone communities.
Guillem Belmar Viernes “Documenting Sa'an Savi ña Ñuu Xnuviko” [MKARL], [IPA]
This project aims at documenting the internal variation of Mixtepec Mixtec by conducting fieldwork in five different villages in the municipality of San Juan Mixtepec. The data collection will consist of an elicitation list for phonological documentation of each variety, as well as recording 20 min of naturalistic speech in each documented variety. These recordings will be archived for easy community access, and they will be used to analyze variation in Mixtepec Mixtec, particularly focusing on phonology and some salient phonetic features. These will also inform the pedagogical materials that our team is already developing. In addition, we expect this first approach at studying the internal variation of Mixtepec Mixtec to contribute to the development of materials for community interpreters, who have long reported a need for a better understanding of the huge linguistic diversity often 'hidden' under language labels.
Yarjis Xueqing Zhong “Documentation of Western Yugur” [MKARL]
This project is part of a long-term effort to develop an ethnographic online multimedia dictionary with the Western Yugur community in China. Western Yugur language is classified as ‘critically endangered’ by the ‘UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger’ with about 2000 speakers. The project aims to document and transcribe the audio/video recordings and make them available on the open-access dictionary website. Specifically, the objectives of this project are to document, transcribe and analyse some of the rich data from a great range of naturalistic speech practices in everyday conversation contexts as well as other context from speakers, and contribute to a comprehensive ethnographic multimedia Western Yugur online dictionary. These documentation outcomes could be seen as both a repository of lexical and cultural knowledge, and a pedagogical tool for revitalizing and maintaining the Western Yugur language and culture.
El Iskonawa es una lengua de la Amazonía peruana que se encuentra en serio peligro de extinción. Sin embargo, en la última década, las nuevas generaciones de jóvenes y adultos vienen realizando esfuerzos para la documentación y la revitalización de su lengua y, a través de ella, de sus prácticas culturales. El financiamiento del The Endangered Language Fund permitirá la continuación de estos esfuerzos mediante la documentación de narraciones sobre la cultura material Iskonawa. Este proyecto se propone registrar audiovisualmente narraciones que den cuenta de los procedimientos para elaborar telas pintadas, cerámicas, cestas y flechas. La documentación será conducida por las mujeres de la Asociación de Artesanas Iskonawa Pari Awin y participarán como narradores tanto ancianos como adultos Iskonawa. El resultado será una colección de narraciones que se alojarán en Youtube para compartirlas con la población Iskonawa como un material que contribuya a la revitalización de la lengua.
(Iskonawa is a language from the Peruvian Amazon that is in serious danger of extinction. However, in the last decade, new generations of young people and adults have been making efforts to document and revitalize their language and, through it, their cultural practices. Funding from The Endangered Language Fund will allow these efforts to continue through the documentation of narratives about Iskonawa material culture. This project intends to record audiovisual narratives that account for the procedures to make painted fabrics, ceramics, baskets and arrows. The documentation will be conducted by the women of the Iskonawa Pari Awin Artisans Association and both Iskonawa elders and adults will participate as narrators. The result will be a collection of stories that will be hosted on YouTube to be shared with the Iskonawa population as material that contributes to the revitalization of the language.)
Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi “Diccionario en formato de aplicación para celular en lengua Kulina-Pano” (“Dictionary for cell phone apps in the Kulina-Pano language”) [MKARL]
Kulina-Pano es un idioma en peligro de extinción, que es hablado por unos 30 ancianos (principalmente mujeres ancianas) que viven entre los Matsés en la Amazonía en Perú y Brasil. Este proyecto documentará el idioma Kulina-Pano con grabaciones de audio de entrevistas y narrativas con los últimos hablantes de este idioma en pueblos Matsés (departamento Loreto, Perú). Los productos finales serán un diccionario Kulina-Matsés-Español en forma de aplicación interactiva para celular, ilustrado con dibujos y con audio. Este será el primer material producido para la revitalización de Kulina-Pano. Además, las grabaciones serán archivadas en el archivo digital del Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (Iquitos Perú). Kulina-Pano es reconocido en Brasil como idioma originario, pero aún no por el gobierno peruano, así parte de este proyecto será solicitar al ministerio de cultura del Perú que reconozca este idioma y dé prioridad a su revitalización.
(Kulina-Pano is an endangered language, spoken by about 30 elders (mainly elderly women) who live among the Matsés in the Amazon in Peru and Brazil. This project will document the Kulina-Pano language with audio recordings of interviews and narratives with the last speakers of this language in Matsés peoples (Loreto department, Peru). The final products will be a Kulina-Matsés-Spanish dictionary in the form of an interactive mobile application, illustrated with drawings and audio. This will be the first material produced for the revitalization of Kulina-Pano. In addition, the recordings will be archived in the digital archive of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon (Iquitos Peru). Kulina-Pano is recognized in Brazil as an original language, but not yet by the Peruvian government, so part of this project will be to request the Peruvian Ministry of Culture to recognize this language and prioritize its revitalization.)
Federico Falletti “Sengwer dictionary and storybook” [MKARL]
Sengwer is an endangered language of a traditionally indigenous hunter-gatherer forest people, which now live in small communities dispersed between three Kenyan counties (Trans-Nzoia, Elgeyo-Marakwet and West-Pokot). This projects aims to create a multilingual (English/Swahili/Sengwer) dictionary for the Sengwer language and a primary-school level storybook to aid language literacy and conservation. The orthography for both will be based on the on-going Bible translation to ensure consistency as well as continued community approval. The dictionary will have two formats: (1) one will be printed and distributed in schools and cultural centres where the community lives and (2) the other will be online, part of the open-source “Living Dictionaries” language documentation and conservation initiative, which will included phonetic transcriptions and audio-visual information for each entry. The dictionary and the storybook were commissioned by representatives of Sengwer and will be written and reviewed in tight- collaboration with young and old community members.
Bai Jianqiong and Nathaniel Sims “Yonghe Qiang digital dictionary project”
This application proposes a collaborative project by Bai Jianqiong and Dr. Nathaniel Sims to create a multilingual, Qiang- Chinese-English digital dictionary for the under-described and endangered Yonghe variety of Qiang (ISO qxs) (Tibeto-Burman/Trans-Himalayan). Yonghe is spoken by approximately 5,000 residents of Yonghe Township, Mao County, Aba Qiang-Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China. The dictionary will be made publicly available via the Lexica series of the Pangloss archive. It will focus on certain lexical domains that are particularly endangered, including names of local flora and fauna, kinship terms, and ritual language. Entries will include phonetic and phonological and morphosyntactic information, with definitions in Chinese and English. Each entry will be replete with an example sentence presented in Qiang with inter-linear glossed and translated illustrating sentences.
Jacob Kodner “Developing a Manchu dictionary and acoustic corpus” [MKARL]
The goal of this project is to collaborate with native speakers of Manchu to film an oral history and expand an online, recorded dictionary already created by the lead researcher and the speaker community. The oral history will be transcribed in Manchu, translated in English and Mandarin, and then interlinearized in English and Mandarin as well. The oral history video, accompanying documentation, and expanded dictionary will all be housed at a single location: "Mini Buleku", a website developed by the lead researcher for the community of Manchu speakers. It is the hope that the oral history and dictionary produced will serve as educational resources to promote the learning and revival of the language. The data collected will also provide fairly comprehensive acoustic and video data on the sound system of Manchu—data that can be used to create an IPA illustration for the language and contribute to ongoing documentation efforts.
Iara Mantenuto and Valencia Teems “Narratives in San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec” [IPA]
This project is part of a long-term collaborative effort to document and revitalize San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec (ISO: mks), a language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. The proposal supports the collection, videorecording, transcription, translation, editing, formatting, analysis, and publication of stories from elderly members of the community. We plan to obtain not only documentation and linguistic information about the language in narratives, but also printed material for our literacy workshops for the young members of the community. We will also organize an event for the community where we are going to share the results of this work in addition to the three children's books we are currently creating. The event will celebrate the first published written material in this language. The material will also be made available on a website online, and the linguistics analysis, together with the rest of the material will be archived in the California Language Archive.
Patricia Nora Riget “JA ATA BIDUNDAN: A Bidayuh storytelling project”
The researchers plan to produce a collection of Bidayuh folktales with their translations in English and Malay. This collection will be made accessible to both the Bidayuhs and the general public via the Dayak Bidayuh National Association (DBNA) and Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya’s forthcoming indigenous language website/platform. The print copy of the storybooks will be distributed as teaching materials to teachers teaching in the Bidayuh’s Playschool or Sikurah Piramin under the Multilingual Education (MLE) project in the Bidayuh villages. The project will aid community members, particularly the younger generations in learning the folktales and the art of storytelling, which is an effective method of language preservation when community-based and culturally explicit. The recordings and texts will be of particular use to scholars working on indigenous literature as well as sociolinguists working on oral folk narrative.
Konrad Rybka “Atorad language camp”
Atorad is an underdocumented, undescribed Arawakan language of Guyana with only four speakers. The four Atorad live in different villages of the Wapichan people speaking another Arawakan language and have not had opportunities to speak Atorad in years. This project will bring them together for a one-week-long language camp to stimulate their Atorad language skill and kick off documentation efforts. The speakers will engage in story-telling, conversations, and elicitation, including sessions using as stimulus the existing, albeit scant and unannotated, Atorad recordings and photographs of Atorad museum objects. All sessions will be archived with the community and the California Language Archive. The project will significantly expand on the extant documentation, contribute to the description of Atorad and the contextualization of Atorad collections. It will also contribute to training local documentation specialists by involving a Wapichan-speaking trainee, building capacity for independent language work in the area where several languages are threatened.
Maaz Shaikh “Documentation of Zangskar Tibetan or Zangskari” [MKARL]
Zangskar Tibetan, or more commonly Zangskari, is an endangered and un(der)documented variety of Tibetan spoken in the Zangskar valley of Ladakh, India. Estimates for the number of Zangskari speakers range from 5,000 to 11,400. The numbers may be perhaps alarming, but what’s more unfortunate is the rate of language attrition of Zangskari to (Leh) Ladakhi due to various reasons. No proper and focused documentation or description of Zangskari has been done so far except for some very preliminary works. For the project funded by the ELF grant, I intend to (1) Produce an annotated digital corpus of approximately two hours of texts in Zangskari, (2) Archiving this corpus and dissemination of results as published papers, and (3) Organize a workshop targeted to train young Zangskaris to document their elders’ speech and archive their collection as well. My long-term goals are to complete a comprehensive documentation and revitalization of Zangskari.
David Shanks “Possession in Southern Tutchone”
Southern Tutchone is a critically endangered Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in the Southern Yukon. With around 40 speakers with an average age of 60 as of 2010, documentation of the language is vital for the revitalization and future of Southern Tutchone. This project will consist of linguistic fieldwork in Whitehorse, Yukon followed by analysis at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The primary methodology will be elicitation of Southern Tutchone speech from two consultants. The analysis will focus on the possessive system, with three major theoretical goals: to analyze the tonal system, which is an important part of possession; to investigate the syntax of possession, comparing it to other Dene languages; and to propose a semantic analysis of possession. This project has been developed with input from community members and aims to both provide linguistic material for future pedagogical materials and strengthen connections between researchers and Southern Tutchone communities.
Guillem Belmar Viernes “Documenting Sa'an Savi ña Ñuu Xnuviko” [MKARL], [IPA]
This project aims at documenting the internal variation of Mixtepec Mixtec by conducting fieldwork in five different villages in the municipality of San Juan Mixtepec. The data collection will consist of an elicitation list for phonological documentation of each variety, as well as recording 20 min of naturalistic speech in each documented variety. These recordings will be archived for easy community access, and they will be used to analyze variation in Mixtepec Mixtec, particularly focusing on phonology and some salient phonetic features. These will also inform the pedagogical materials that our team is already developing. In addition, we expect this first approach at studying the internal variation of Mixtepec Mixtec to contribute to the development of materials for community interpreters, who have long reported a need for a better understanding of the huge linguistic diversity often 'hidden' under language labels.
Yarjis Xueqing Zhong “Documentation of Western Yugur” [MKARL]
This project is part of a long-term effort to develop an ethnographic online multimedia dictionary with the Western Yugur community in China. Western Yugur language is classified as ‘critically endangered’ by the ‘UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger’ with about 2000 speakers. The project aims to document and transcribe the audio/video recordings and make them available on the open-access dictionary website. Specifically, the objectives of this project are to document, transcribe and analyse some of the rich data from a great range of naturalistic speech practices in everyday conversation contexts as well as other context from speakers, and contribute to a comprehensive ethnographic multimedia Western Yugur online dictionary. These documentation outcomes could be seen as both a repository of lexical and cultural knowledge, and a pedagogical tool for revitalizing and maintaining the Western Yugur language and culture.
