Two of Alaska's most highly endangered languages are Tlingit and Deg Xinag Athabascan. The first currently has about 150 speakers who learned the language from birth, and the other currently has just nine. Dr. Richard Dauenhauer and Dr. Alice Taff will undertake three projects addressing the different needs of these two communities, sharing techniques and insights along the way. The Deg Xinag project will prepare for publication an existing 4.5-hour corpus of Deg Xinag stories and personal histories, recorded from seven speakers in 2002-3. Despite this recent vintage, five of the speakers have since passed on. There is very little time remaining to translate these stories and make them available. This task will be performed with the help of younger community members (many learning their heritage language), who will work with elder native speakers. For Tlingit, a pilot project to document spontaneous conversation will engage young adult Tlingit learners to make video recordings of fluent elders holding conversations, then work with the elders to transcribe and translate the audio. A two-hour-long bilingual video, with accompanying text, is expected. The third project, also for Tlingit, will tap the knowledge of an 80-year old speaker, who is the only living person who knows what is in a collection of Tlingit audio recordings from the past 40 years. All of the above materials will be archived at the Alaska Native Language Center and also the Anvik Museum, Anvik, AK. .
This work can only be undertaken now, while the speakers remain in good health. The younger generations are trying to gain competence in their heritage languages, and the materials produced will greatly increase their ability to become fluent speakers themselves. The project will engage two generations in language documentation and revitalization by educating language community members in best practices for language documentation. The local university will be engaged with the language community in new ways, to the benefit of both. A wealth of cultural and linguistic data will be maintained by these efforts.
