Joyce McDonough to map Mackenzie Basin languages

[James Crippen]

The following is a press release that I saw on the ILAT mailing list.
Congrats to Joyce! Sally Rice is mentioned as well.

I note that the text on the website is mangled. I fixed "Dene
Sųłiné" to be "Dene Sųłiné" which is what I presume
it was supposed to be before someone's database software buggered up
the Unicode to HTML entity conversion.

The project sounds fun. I'd like to do something similar for Tlingit dialects.

= = = = =

$201,670 NSF Grant to Create Online Atlas of Endangered Native Languages

http://media-newswire.com/release_1117246.html

University of Rochester linguist Joyce McDonough has been awarded a
two-year, $201,670 National Science Foundation Polar Institute grant
to develop an interactive online speech atlas of endangered native
languages of the Mackenzie Basin, a vast and sparsely populated region
of northwestern Canada.

(Media-Newswire.com) - University of Rochester linguist Joyce
McDonough has been awarded a two-year, $201,670 National Science
Foundation Polar Institute grant to develop an interactive online
speech atlas of endangered native languages of the Mackenzie Basin, a
vast and sparsely populated region of northwestern Canada.

"Heritage languages are under considerable socio-economic pressure
from the English and French speaking overculture," explains McDonough.
"Fewer and fewer native North Americans are becoming fluent in their
heritage tongues, and those who are fluent or want to learn their
languages face increasingly reduced opportunities to speak and learn
in their tongue, a situation that undermines the stability of these
communities and their cultural knowledge." The problem, McDonough
adds, is worsened by the comparatively low level of linguistic
documentation available on these languages.

"This web site," says McDonough, "can be a critical tool to those
interested in preserving linguistic diversity and for helping
communities hold on to their native languages before they vanish."

The Speech Atlas will focus on the sound systems of the area's
Athabaskan, or as speakers prefer, Dene languages. It will be
developed as an online site for sharing information, research, and
educational resources between the academic institution and the
indigenous communities, especially for those members who are
interested in language documentation and revitalization.

The Speech Atlas's web site will provide geotagged links to the
individual Dene speaking communities in the Mackenzie River drainage
basin, with examples and descriptions of the sound phonemes for each
community and with words demonstrating those sounds spoken by native
speaker from that community. Words will be written using both the
International Phonetic Alphabet and the orthography used in that
community. Online sound files will allow users to listen to native
speakers pronouncing the consonants and vowels sounds in words, and to
experience the tone, intonation, rhythm, and meter of the speech of
each language. The project will highlight both the striking similarity
among the Dene languages in Canada and the distinct variations that
have evolved in these typically small and isolated villages.

The information will be developed as overlays, permitting it to be
associated with internet map systems such as Google Earth. This
map-based approach is key, says McDonough, because it allows language
documentation to be localized to a specific community, reflecting the
way Dene see themselves. "The Dene strongly identify with their
communities," explains McDonough; "a native from Cold Lake is not only
a Dene Sųłiné, but a Cold Lake Dene Sųłiné."

The web site builds on the work of the Canadian Indigenous Language
and Literacy Development Institute, which provides training for native
speakers in linguistic methodology for language documentation and
analysis. Working with Institute co-director Sally Rice, professor of
linguistics from the University of Alberta, and a team of academic and
native linguists, McDonough plans to initially feature about 10 Dene
language communities, including Cold Lake; Fort Chipewyan, Alberta;
Rae, N.W.T.; and Deline, N.W.T. She hopes the web site will encourage
other Dene communities to embrace the technically challenging and time
consuming work of documenting their languages.

The Dene languages, spoken from Alaska south to the Rio Grande,
constitute the largest and most geographically widespread language
family of native North America. The language family includes Navajo,
which with 140,000 native speakers ranks as the most widely spoken
indigenous language in the United States.