Documentation of the Hocank language

[Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht]

Dear Siouanists,

I'd like to diseminate some information about
a recently launched project for the documentation of
the Hocank language via this list. It might be of
interest for linguists working on other Siouan
languages as well.

The documentation project is one of about twenty
or so projects within the large funding initiative
for the documentation of endangered languages of the
Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. The Volkswagen
Foundation has nothing to do with cars as you
might assume. It is a foundation with a
remarkable budget (the money came originally
from the privatization of the Volkswagen company
- I guess way back in the 50ies)that aims at funding
innovative research in various fields of science,
and sometimes even in the humanities. The funding
initiative for the documentation of endangered
languages started a few years ago. The central goal
of the specific projects is to create a
representative text corpus of the specific
endangered language including audio and video tapes
of all kinds of text types such as narrations,
conversations, and so on. The recordings of the
texts have to be transcribed, grammatically glossed,
and translated so that they are accessible for
non-speakers of the language. The texts corpora will
be archived at the Max Planck Institute of
Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands, they
are supposed to be accessible to everyone, to the people of the community that is in danger of loosing its language, to linguists, to anthropologists etc. If you wish to learn more about the general outline of the funding initiative, check out the web sites of the Max Planck Institute and the Volkswagen Foundation:

http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/
http://www.volkswagen-stiftung.de/suchen/index_e.html

Now, I would like to turn over to an outline of the project for the documentation of the Hocank language. Within this three years project we try to accomplish several sub-projects. First of all, we work on a represenative corpus of texs, a kind of oral library of the Hocank language. We plan (and already have begun) to tape (audio and video)stories and conversations of all kinds of situations, participants, and genres. Because of the degree of endangerment of Hocank, there are some restrictions, e.g. it seems that parents - kids conversations are no longer possible to document and the like. But the situation is definitely much better in Hocank than in other languages such as in Wichita where only a few speakers and semi-speakers are left.

The second sub-project of our project is the creation of a bidirectional dictionary Hocank-English and English-Hocank. We start from the various lexical studies that already exist and that are compiled in Valdis Zeps dictionary. We have already converted this dictionary into a shoebox database (with more than 6000 entries) and have begun to revise the entries linguistically. Josephien Withe Eagle's lexical study served in a way as a linguistic role model for the format of the  entries. A lot of words are missing in the Zeps file, many entries lack grammatical information altogether, and many English glosses are wrong or rather missleading. Based on the glossing and translation of our recorded texts we will enrich and revise the whole dictionary within the next three years.

The third sub-project is the grammatical description of the Hocank language. For quite a while, I am myself working on the grammar of Hocank. A first draft of the a grammar of Hocank will/ should (?) be written by the end of the next year. This grammar will go beyond the somewhat restricted morphological perspective of Lipkind and Susman. Currently, I am working hard to learn more about the syntax (simple and complex clauses etc.)of Hocank. I will also distribute some of my findings in form of papers to the Siouanists community so that they may be discussed from a wider Siouan point of view.

The fourth sub-project is the development of linguistically structured teaching materials that should be helpfull useable for the language teachers of the Hocank Language Division (in Mauston, WI), as well as for the students. Here we are really starting from the scratch, although the Hocank Language Division has developed some materials mostly dealing with structured vocabularies. The grammar, the dictionary, and the text corpus we are working on should serve as a basis for this enterprise. It is also planned to teach the language teachers to use these materials efficiently.

Such a project as the documentation of the Hocank language cannot be achieved by one person, we are a team and I should now introduce the individuals involved in this project. The directors of the project are Prof. Christian Lehmann and myself from the University of Erfurt, Germany. Prof. Lehmann has worked a lot on language endangerment and the possibilities of the docmentation of a language. He was also one of the group of German linguists who worked out a proposal for such a large funding initiative for the Volkswagen Foundation back in the second half of the 90ies. We have two co-workers, Nils Jahn, Juliane Lindenlaub (she joined us very recently), and a student aid, Iren Hartmann. This is the German side of the project that works in close cooperation with the Hocank side of the project. The Hocank side is basically the Hocank Language Division in Mauston, WI. The director of the Language Division, Willard Lonetree, has supported this project from the beginning. The trib
al government, the legislators, approved this project as useful for the tribe and documented their commitment to this project by funding two additional positions in the Hocank Language Division particularly for this project. So there are two tribal members, Henning Garvin and Kjetil Lowe, who both graduated in linguistics.

I think this should suffice for the moment, but I promise to add some news about the project occasionally in the future.


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Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht
Universität Erfurt
Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Postfach 900221
D-99105 Erfurt, Deutschland
Tel. ++49/ 361/ 737-4202
Fax. ++49/ 361/ 737-4209
E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at uni-erfurt.de

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