Koasati is an endangered language with 200 speakers. This project is a collaborative endeavor among The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, an anthropologist at McNeese University, and linguists at The College of William and Mary and UC Santa Barbara to conduct the first phonetic study of Koasati. The data will be gathered over two years and will consist of analyses of scripted surveys of fluent speakers and conversational data. In order to maintain existing community support, the project will also seek to expand an existing audio dictionary of 1,200 words and to assist and train tribal members in lexicography, ethno-botany, and language documentation.
The intellectual merit of the proposal lies in providing basic, quantified data regarding Koasati consonants and vowels, the pitch accent system in nouns, the grammatical system of tone in verbs, as well as phrasal and sentence-level prosody. These aspects of Koasati are not well described, and the researchers' pilot studies suggest important differences between Koasati and both Creek and Chickasaw. These findings will contribute to knowledge of sound patterns in Koasati, Muskogean languages, North American languages, and language in general. The multimedia dictionary will provide a lasting record of the pronunciation of words.
The project will have a broader impact in training tribal members in language documentation, in training graduate and undergraduate students in instrumental phonetics, and in providing a model within linguistics of collaborative, interdisciplinary, community-based research.
The major objectives of this project include: 1. To examine vowel quality, length contrasts in vowels and consonants, the limited system of lexical tone contrasts in nouns, and the grammatical system of tone in Koasati verbs. 2. To study the realization of several word-final consonant clusters (fn, tl, lw, etc.) that are absent in related languages and that are typologically unusual due to their sonority reversals. 3. To examine the cognates in related languages of the tones documented in Koasati nouns and verbs. Significant results of this project include: 1. Providing the first scientific, quantitative description of a number of phonetic properties of Koasati, some of which are typical of Muskogean languages and some of which are unusual. 2. Documenting several linguistic elements of Koasati that are typical of other Muskogean languages, as well as several linguistic strategies that are much more rare in other languages. Key project achievements include: Development of 3 multimedia web sites with digital recordings of spoken Koasati, including one web site dedicated to a multimedia dictionarywhich was expanded to include approximately 2500 words and phrases, each with at least 1 audiorecording of spoken Koasati, and two web sites with longer recordings sub-titled in both English and Koasati (personal narratives, oral histories, and conversations) Development of a printed Koasati dictionary distributed to the Coushatta community in August 2013 Development of an iOS multimedia Koasati application A peer-reviewed IJAL publication (forthcoming in January 2015 edition) Presentations at three major conferences Training provided to numerous members of the Coushatta tribal community in recording, transcribing, translating, archiving, and teaching Koasati. Tribal members have also been trained and participated in web site development, multimedia application development, and development of Koasati teaching materials.
