The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. These languages are present in everyday life for most Americans in the names for places, plants, animals and more. This project will focus on place names for two Central Alaska Native languages and their dialects. Both languages are what is known as 'sleeping' languages, when there are no remaining fluent first language speakers. Focusing on extensive collections of audio recordings and language and ethnographic notes, this project will prioritize these materials for transcription and editing. Importantly, the project will also include a focus on place names, not just the names themselves, but also cultural vocabulary and narratives where places are discussed and integrating Geographic Information System (GIS) data in a multilingual format. The interrelated methods employed for dictionary files, texts, cultural vocabulary, and geographic annotation will create a durable archival record. Broader impacts include the accessibility of place names (of importance for communities, geographers, and governmental agencies, among others), outreach to public schools, and materials available to Alaska Native communities for language and cultural revitalization. The products and digital files for the project will be available through the Alaska Native Language Center and the Alaska Native Language Archive.
The project will serve as the capstone of a productive career for the PI, who has spent nearly five decades documenting the Dene languages, especially those of Alaska, including the focus of this work, the Toklat dialect of the Lower Tanana language (the lower Kantishna River & the Toklat River) and the Middle Tanana language (Tanana River between Moose Creek and Goodpaster River). The Dene (formerly Athabaskan) language family is of great significance to linguistics, with members including Navajo, Apache, and numerous Alaska languages. Both Toklat and Middle Tanana have extensive collections of narratives and ethnographic notes recorded between 1964 and 2000, including from well-known storytellers Bessie Barnabus and Eva Moffit, from Salcha and Hester Evan and Celia Peterson, from Toklat & Nenana. Incorporating women's language will further enrich the documentation and historical record. The project will also give special attention to geographic names and place annotations for the middle and lower Tanana Valley Dene language groups. Two dictionary files for Middle Tanana and Lower Tanana that were begun in the 1990s will be expanded to include shared Dene cultural vocabulary items, the common verb themes, and all grammatical morphemes. Place name records for the two languages will be combined in stages with place name inventories for adjacent Dene languages (Ahtna, Tanacross and Koyukon). These expanded materials will clarify the classification of the Dene languages of the lower Tanana Valley and the study of Alaska prehistory. The beta version of this multilingual Dene geodatabase with a digital webmap will foster editorial consistency and mapping accuracy. Eventually (and beyond the scope of this project), this extensible multilingual Alaska Dene place names geodatabase can facilitate the integration of Dene geographic information with scientific databases (in archaeology, ecology, or climatology), or language learning, or for public education, applied toponymy (official naming) and land management by both tribal and government entities.
