With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Stephen Marlett and his colleague Mary Moser will conduct two years of linguistic research on Seri, an indigenous language in northwestern Mexico used by under 700 people. One goal of this research is to complete the first comprehensive dictionary of Seri. The dictionary will include a brief description of the Seri grammar for both native-speaker and outsider use. The project will also produce a corpus of interlinearized texts. These texts will be based on materials edited by Seri associates and published for the language community as a contribution to the preservation of culturally-important literature. They will be presented with practical spelling, phonological spelling, interlinear Spanish and English word glosses, and free translation in Spanish and English. They complement the dictionary and grammar by showing the words in literary context. The groundwork for this research includes extensive fieldwork, circulation of drafts of the work, and personal interaction with three generations of members of the Seri people. Researchers will now verify thousands of lexical entries and their accompanying illustrative sentences. Experts will be consulted in the areas of ichthyology, ornithology, herpetology, and botany. The dictionary and interlinearized texts will be in Seri, Spanish, and English. The inclusion of Spanish will make the work useful to Seri speakers, as well as to non-Seri Spanish speakers in Mexico. The inclusion of English expands the audience to international linguists and anthropologists doing research on the area's ecology. The researchers have worked closely with native Seri authorities and other members of the Seri nation at all stages of the dictionary and grammar preparation, to ensure completeness, usefulness, appropriateness, and accessibility.
The significance of this research is twofold. First, the Seri language is the sole surviving language of a linguistic family within the putative Hokan stock. Little information is available about other now-extinct languages that may have been closely related to it. The dictionary will support more historical and comparative linguistic research. The Seri people were still living by traditional hunting and gathering in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, study of their language is as significant for the field of anthropology as it is for the field of linguistics. Second, this project's dictionary, grammar, and translated texts will be available to the Seri community in a format that is supportive of language maintenance efforts and bilingual education. These works will also aid (English- and Spanish-speaking) researchers who increasingly work with Seri associates in ecology and related fields, but who are handicapped by the language barrier. An important additional result of the project is the training that some key Seri men and women will receive in editing and processing Seri language materials. This will benefit the Seri people for years into the future.
