ELL: Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

[whalen at LENNY.HASKINS.YALE.EDU]

            Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

      The Endangered Language Fund is pleased to announce its grant
awards for 1999.  The Fund is a nonprofit organization dedicated to
the scientific description of endangered languages, support for
maintenance efforts, and dissemination of the results of those two
effort to the scholarly community and the native communities.  These
twelve grants received almost $20,000 in funding, made possible
entirely by the support of our members.  Please visit our web site at
http://www.ling.yale.edu/~elf.
      Elena Benedicto (Purdue University), Indigenous Women as
Linguists.  The goal of this project is to form a team of Mayangna
women in linguistic techniques, so that they can later use that
knowledge in the bilingual programs of Nicaragua.  This is an
indigenous effort to provide educational materials which brings the
generations together in a single project.
      Marianne Milligan (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Menominee
Phonology and Morphology.  Only a few speakers of Menominee remain,
and they show varying degrees of fluency.  The Menominee tribe has
expressed interest in revitalizing their language, but there is a lack
of materials and speakers to contribute to the effort.  The present
work on the phonology and morphology of Menominee will provide some of
the material for a language curriculum.
      Jonette Sam (Pueblo of Picuris), An Integrated Approach to
Language Renewal at Picuris Pueblo, New Mexico.  This grant allowed
four members of the Language Committee of the Pueblo of Picuris to
attend the 6th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference in
Tucson, AZ, this past June.  The discussions of such topics as
language camps, language in sports and other community recreation,
language at work, language in religion and culture, language and the
media, and language in community historical and cultural research
proved very valuable.
      Carolyn J. MacKay and Frank R. Trechsel (Ball State University),
A Linguistic Description of Pisa Flores Tepehua.  This variety of
Tepehua, spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, is a member of the Totonacan
language family, a group of linguistic isolates in Mesoamerica.  The
texts and elicited words will be used for a dictionary, grammatical
descriptions, and, ultimately, interlinear translations of the texts.
      Yogendra P. Yadava (Royal Nepal Academy), A Study of the Dhangar
Language.  Dhangar is the only member of the Dravidian language family
spoken in Nepal.  The present work will provide basic linguistic
description which will be necessary for any serious language
maintenance program.  This will include the beginnings of work on
linguistic affiliation, grammar, sociolinguistic perspectives,
literacy and databased texts and lexicon.
      Delphine Red Shirt (Guilford, CT), Winyan Isnala: My Mother's
Story.  From her early days in North Dakota, Red Shirt's mother was a
source of wisdom, and recordings of their phone conversations and
visits over the past several years included much of the history and
lore of the Lakota people.  Between the time of the submission of this
grant and its being awarded, Red Shirt's mother passed away, making
the transcription and editing of those texts even more urgent.  The
grant from ELF will help make that possible.
      Yaron Matras (University of Manchester), A Description of the
Domari Language of Jerusalem.  Domari is an Indic language spoken by a
socially isolated and marginalized community in the Old City of
Jerusalem. All of the fluent speakers of Domari are over 40 years of
age, most in their 60s, with Arabic taking its place.  Very little
description of the language exists, and Matras will begin a more
complete description based on 20 hours of recordings already collected
supplemented by further field work.
      James T. Collins (National University of Malaysia), Documenting
and Describing the Tola' Language.  Many previously ill-described
areas of Borneo are inhabited by autochthonous Dayak groups, speaking
a number of diverse languages and dialects.  The language to be
studied, Tola', is an undescribed Malayic variant spoken in four
villages.  Building on previous wordlists, Collins will begin work on
a grammar and on a survey of language use and attitudes.
      Hongkai Sun (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Recording the
Last Fluent Speakers of Anong, a Language of Yunnan (PRC).  The Anongs
are a branch of the Nu nationality, numbering 7,300 but with only 50
or 60 fluent speakers of the ancestral language.  Sun plans to augment
his fieldwork from the early 1960s, aiming to collect 12,000 words for
the dictionary, preserve the oral literature as far as possible,
analyze the linguistic structure, make recordings, and assess the
state of the language.
      Silverio Jimenez (Mexico City), The Nahuatl from Milpa Alta.
The Nahuatl spoken in this area of Mexico is relatively conservative
in its changes from the Aztec times.  Although Nahuatl is Jimenez's
heritage language, his own experience of learning only Spanish while
growing up is indicative of the endangered state of this language.  He
will be using modern technology to help document that past, as
embodied in the language and the stories of the elders.
      Veronica M. Grondona (University of Pittsburgh), Material
development for Bilingual Education among the Mocovi.  Mocovi is a
Waikuruan language of approximately 4,000 speakers in Argentina.
Increased contact with Spanish has led to a decline the use of Mocovi,
and many speakers are migrating out of the area to look for better
work opportunities.  Grondona intends to use the material from her
1998 Ph.D. dissertation as a basis for developing bilingual education
materials.  Grondona will assist native speakers of Mocovi in the
development of these materials.
      David VanBik (Haka, Chin State, Burma), Lai (Haka Chin)-English
Dictionary.  In Burma, minority languages such as Lai are not allowed
to be taught in the schools, and Burmese is increasingly dominant in
the linguistic landscape.  The availability of a dictionary from Lai
into English will increase the value of the minority language by
giving its speakers access to a world language without going through
the national language.  VanBik has already completed an English-Lai
dictionary; the Lai-English version will be of more practical use to
the native community.

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