"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
With National Science Foundation support, Theodore Fernald and Irene Silentman will conduct a two-year, multi-faceted project on Navajo, an endangered language of the southwestern United States. They will run a collaborative workshop to allow language teachers and linguists to support each other in their work. They will videotape and transcribe Navajo conversations on topics of language use in various social settings. These conversations will contribute to the development of a User's Guide to Navajo. The workshop will include courses on phonology, the structure of the verb, how to teach verb forms to students, and a course in advanced topics in linguistics. The workshop will allow linguists (both from inside and outside the Navajo Nation) to carry out analyses of Navajo grammar and language usage. The language teachers will have the opportunity to gain a clearer understanding of the workings of Navajo grammar, particularly in the complex area of verbal morphology. The linguists will have the opportunity to use their expertise in the service of language teaching.
With roughly 80,000 to 100,000 native speakers, Navajo is the largest native speech community in North America. But the language is generally not being passed on to the youngest generation. The collaboration between language teachers and linguists that this project supports will aid community efforts to strengthen the use of Navajo and maintain its rich linguistic and literary tradition. The User's Guide will be invaluable to second language learners as well as to linguists. The videotapes and transcription will be a resource for linguists to test analyses of grammatical phenomena and to further describe how Navajo fits into the spectrum of human languages.
