"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
The goal of this project is the documentation of spontaneous connected speech, with a focus on conversation in natural settings, in two languages indigenous to North America. The result will be two substantial corpora, complete with audio and video recordings, transcription, and translation. The two languages, Ahtna and Navajo, represent the two major branches of one of the largest language families of North America. Ahtna, a Northern Athabascan language, is spoken in Alaska. Navajo, a Southern Athabascan language, is spoken over a wide area of the Southwest. Both are still actively used by older speakers at the moment, but both are endangered: no children are learning Ahtna, and few are learning Navajo. When one language is being replaced by another(English, in this case), one of the first aspects of the heritage language to fade is traditional patterns of expression. The result is that traditional ways of organizing thought in speech, and of interacting linguistically, slip away nearly unnoticed. Grammatical categories and patterns of expression that have evolved over millennia can disappear with little trace.
The Athabascan languages have tremendous potential for contributing to our understanding of language in general. The conceptual categories delimited by their vocabulary, and the semantic distinctions encoded in their grammars are strikingly and fundamentally different from those of the better-described languages that have served as the foundation for linguistic theory. Speakers of Athabascan languages say very different things when speaking than do English speakers. Dictionaries and basic grammatical descriptions now exist for both Ahtna and Navajo, but the missing piece is how the words and grammatical structures are actually used. The documentation of spontaneous speech in natural settings is a crucial step at this point in the history of these languages and in the field of linguistics. The corpora will provide open-ended records of the languages which will constitute a stable resource as theoretical concerns evolve and new questions come to the fore. They will make it possible to observe the larger contexts in which forms and constructions are used, relative frequencies of speaker choices, the prosodic patterns accompanying structures, and styles of interaction. The project also has major educational components. Doctoral students (one of whom is himself Navajo) and community members will receive cutting-edge training in language documentation, archiving, and analysis. The corpora will serve not just as a resource for academic research, but also as the basis for projects of central concern to the Athna and Navajo communities: language teaching, language revitalization, and language appreciation.
