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

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

$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.
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