11.151, FYI: Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-151. Mon Jan 24 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.151, FYI: Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

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1)
Date:  Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:17:16 -0500 (EST)
From:  whalen at lenny.haskins.yale.edu
Subject:  Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:17:16 -0500 (EST)
From:  whalen at lenny.haskins.yale.edu
Subject:  Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

	

	
	FYI: 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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