"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
What Tlingit conversations do birth speakers of Tlingit use to carry on their daily lives? What record of daily functional language will learners and scientists look to in the future? The Tlingit language is a branch of the Na-Dene language family indigenous to Southeast Alaska, the interior of British Columbia and Yukon Territory, Canada. Of the 45 languages in the Nuclear Na-Dene language family, there are two branches; Tlingit is one; all the others arise from the other branch. There are approximately 200 Tlingit birth-speakers, most in their 70s and older. During the last two years, this group has suffered a 13% mortality rate, a rate which will accelerate since the population of birth-speakers is aging. Recordings of Tlingit common, everyday conversation, are scant but crucially important for language documentation; everyday conversation is the means of functional communication. We need a record of conversation for analysis, learning, and preservation.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Alice Taff, Richard L. Dauenhauer and the project team of Tlingit faculty and students at the University of Alaska Southeast will produce a video record of spontaneous Tlingit conversation with bilingual, time-aligned annotations, and make the results available to scientists and the language learning community. A second result will be increased Tlingit language and literacy skills, knowledge of linguistic concepts, and experience in language documentation and archiving for members of the Tlingit language community, highly active in its language revitalization efforts. To make recordings, birth speakers will be videoed talking in groups of two or more while carrying out common daily activities. Then teams of birth-speakers and students will transcribe the conversations in Tlingit and broadly translate them into English. The videos will be post-produced as QuickTime subtitled movies for use by the regional and international Tlingit language-learning community. The team will catalogue the recordings with their transcription/translations and archive them for discovery and access for scientific analysis. Community and scientific collaboration will inform the project at all stages of work so that as many different people, dialects, topics of interest, and grammatical forms as possible are documented. Advances in information technology will be exploited in all phases of the project.
