Endangered Language

Language Legacies Projects

• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
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• 2000
• 1999
• 1998
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• Namgay Thinley and Gwendolyn HyslopDzongkha Development Commission / University of Oregon

  An Orthography and Grammatical Sketch of ’Olekha
  
  This project is the winner of the Bright Award for 2010. ’Olekha is an extremely endangered language of Bhutan with possibly just one elderly speaker left. From the little we know of this language, it seems quite different from other related languages. It seems likely that ’Olekha may retain archaic features which have been replaced everywhere else by the influence of Bodish languages, but further documentation is necessary to determine if this is true. Because members of the ’Olekha community are concerned about the endangerment of their language, the priority is the phonological analysis and working orthography along with a brief grammatical sketch of the language. Elicitation, combined with the knowledge of the phonologies of other East Bodish languages, will serve as the primary methodology for phonological analysis. Another goal of the research is to collect as many local stories, legends, oral histories and storytelling/verbal arts in general as possible. These recordings will be used as a springboard for grammatical analysis, supplementing the data with elicitation. This study of the language will produce the first phonological sketch and grammatical outline of the language. As an unusual variety of a relatively unstudied sub-group, a description of the language will be a contribution to historical and comparative Tibeto-Burman studies.
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• Tye SwallowSaanich Adult Education Center

  SENĆOŦEN Language Revitalization and Sustainability Plan - Learning from Homeland Curriculum Development Project
  
  The mission of the SENĆOŦEN language department of the Saanich Indian School Board (British Columbia) is to begin immersion programming from pre-school to grade three. SENĆOŦEN is a highly endangered language with only 20 fluent speakers. The ELF award will be used towards funding a “Learning from Place Language Immersion” curriculum that will directly feed into the current development of a university-level language immersion course for a new Language Revitalization degree program being developed by the University of Victoria.
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• Lalnunthangi ChhangteConverge Worldwide

  Documentation of the Ralte Language
  
  Ralte is a Tibeto-Burman language, classified as belonging to the Kuki-Chin languages and closely related to Mizo (Lushai). However, Ralte shares more similarities with the Paihte language, spoken further northeast in the state of Manipur in northeastern India. The Raltes once lived as a separate community, speaking their own language, but they now consider themselves to belong to the Lushai language and culture group. Thus, most people are surprised to find that Ralte was once spoken widely in the Lushai inhabited areas of present-day Mizoram. The remaining 80 fluent speakers have made efforts on their own to record the language. The goal of this project is to gather all the data that has been collected so far and to organize and preserve the information so that future generations will know what the language sounded like.
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• Chad Thompson and Dani TippmannThe Three Rivers Language Center / Whitley County Historical Museum

  The Miami Language and Cultural Camp
  
  The Miami language, an endangered Native American language from the lower Great Lakes region, has been classified as “extinct” but the 15th edition of Ethnologue (2005) notes that “There are some who know a few words and phrases. A revitalization is in progress” (Gordon 2000). An increasing number of Miami people are currently speaking their language, and the latest Ethnologue no longer categorizes the language as extinct (Lewis 2009). The language is still at least highly endangered, and this project will draw on the expertise, personnel and materials of other successful programs to support a day camp for Miami children between the ages of 10 and 15. During the week, children will be encouraged to speak as much of the language as possible while they make culturally-related crafts with the help of elders/cultural teachers and camp counselors and are immersed in the Miami language as much as possible.
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• Digna Lipa-od AdonisBenguet Network

  Eg Tayo Kari Dibkhanan, Let Us Not Forget: A Documentation of the Ibaloy Indigenous Language in Benguet, Philippines
  
  There are approximately 55,000 native speakers of Ibaloy, an endangered language belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages spoken in northern Luzon in the southern part of the Province of Benguet in the Philippines. Ibaloy has been giving way to Ilocano, with Tagalog and English as second languages. This project aims to support two ongoing Ibaloy language and culture preservation initiatives through interviews with native speakers to compile an extensive list of Ibaloy conversational phrases, dialogue text material on cultural subjects, and word lists that make up selected semantic domains. Audio recordings will be collected of the listed words, phrases and themes and endangered cultural activities will be gathered by video recording.
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• Adam BakerAcademy of Sciences of Afghanistan

  Ishkashimi Language Documentation & Development
  
  Ishkashimi is spoken by about 1,500 people in Afghanistan and another 1,000 in Tajikistan. A recent shift to Dari, the language of wider communication, has led many Ishkashimis to believe that their children will speak only Dari in the future. At the same time, the Ishkashimi people value their language and wish to see it developed, responding very positively to the ideas of producing an orthographic system for Ishkashimi, producing Ishkashimi books, and holding literacy classes in Ishkashimi. The first goal is to support the language community’s becoming literate in Ishkashimi, including developing books. The second goal is to produce an annotated corpus of Ishkashimi language data, to be made available to linguists in the form of a language data archive.
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• Olga LovickFirst Nations University of Canada

  Transcription, Translation, and Annotation of Upper Tanana Athabascan
  
  Upper Tanana is an Athabascan language spoken in several communities in eastern Alaska and across the Canadian border in the Yukon Territory. With fewer than 100 speakers, the youngest being in their 40s, Upper Tanana is a highly endangered language. Most of the speakers are elders who generally do not use the language when non-speakers are present, and it is no longer used in church or other ritual contexts. Recently, several untranscribed recordings of Upper Tanana speakers made by linguist James Kari in the 1990s have been found in the Yukon Native Language Center. These will be transcribed and made available with the help of the remaining native speakers.
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• Jonathan David Bobaljik, David Koester, and Tatiana DegaiUniversity of Connecticut / National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan / Itelmen Community

  Itelmen Language Audio Recordings
  
  The Itelmen language is the sole member of the Kamchatkan branch of Chukotko-Kamchatkan and is quite distinct from the Chukotkan languages in many ways. In the Itelmen population of 3,000, only 15 to 20 are fluent native speakers, scattered among various villages and the main city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskij, Russia. Although there is an official orthography, no native speakers are literate in Itelmen. Because there is a particular lack of multimedia material, the ELF award will be used to allow Tatiana Degai, a young member of the Itelmen community, to travel to two villages to collect recordings based on targeted elicitation lists constructed by Bobaljik, as well as to collect additional recordings, such as narratives of various sorts. The recordings will be used for language revitalization, archiving and pedagogy purposes.
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• Asha Mulki

  Preservation of Sakuye Indigenous Language
  
  Northern Kenya is home to the Sakuye community and four pastoralist communities of Somali origin. Sakuye culture is based on hunting and gathering, which helps sustain the language; pastoralist communities in northern Kenya speak Somali. A young generation has had to move into neighboring Ethiopia and then return after a peace agreement; they returned, however, with a different lifestyle, culture and language. This project will collect poems, oral narratives, songs, folklore, and other practices that surround marriage ceremony, ceremony for sacred areas, cultural festivals and some important Sakuye sayings and words. The collections will be preserved and circulated to the indigenous Sakuye community through media that reach all the four districts of northern Kenya.
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• Deborah SanchezBarbareño Chumash Council

  Chumash Family Singers Recording Project
  
  The Barbareño Chumash Council is a tribal group comprised of Chumash descendants of the greater Santa Barbara area. Some Council members participate in the Chumash Family Singers, a group that uses traditional native instruments and incorporates the Šmuwič (Barbareño Chumash) language into its material. The primary goal of this project is to create original Chumash songs in the Šmuwič language that can be shared with the Chumash community and the public. The planned recording would benefit Chumash community members who wish to learn songs, and would also encourage the regular use of the Šmuwič language through song.
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• Ana Carolina HechtUniversity of Buenos Aires

  Documentation of Language Socialization Practices in Intercultural School Contexts of Language Shift of Toba
  
  The Toba Language (Guaycurú family) is spoken by an estimated 33,000 speakers both in Chaco, Formosa and Santa Fe Provinces as well as Gran Buenos Aires. The ELF award will be used to compare these two contexts, particularly the relationship between the treatment of languages in school projects developed among indigenous populations and the representations and uses of indigenous languages in educational processes inside (and outside) the scholastic setting. This research is important not only in academic terms but also in terms of the possibilities of designing educational public policies sensitive to the rights and identity of indigenous peoples.
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• Angoua Jean-Jacques Tano

  Documentation and Description of Ivorian Sign Language
  
  As in several countries in West Africa, at least two sign languages are used in the Ivory Coast. American Sign Language (ASL) is used in Deaf education and by educated Deaf adults; however deaf individuals with no formal schooling use various forms of Ivorian Sign Language or Langue des Signes de Côte d’Ivoire (LSCI). ASL is spreading within the Ivorian Deaf community at the cost of LSCI; more generally, the prominence of ASL in West Africa overshadows the local sign languages to such an extent that the latter are falling into disues. This project is part of an effort to document and analyze LSCI in various parts of the Ivory Coast.
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• Annahita Farudi and Maziar ToosarvandaniUniversity of Massachusetts / UC Berkeley

  A Community-based Oral History Project for Zoroastrian Dari
  
  Zoroastrian Dari (also called Zartoshti, Behdinˆani, or Gabri) is a Central Plateau language of the Northwestern subbranch of the Iranian language family (Indo-European). It is spoken by the Zoroastrian religious minority of Iran, primarily in and around the city of Yazd, and is distinct from the eponymous dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan. The 5,000 fluent speakers who remain are the last generation to grow up when the language was still the community’s primary mode of communication. This project will record the oral histories of elderly Zoroastrian residents of Yazd, documenting Dari as it was spoken before modernization, when the Zoroastrians of Yazd still lived in isolated agrarian communities.
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• Syngen KanassategaMille Lacs Band Government Center

  Ojibwe Cultural Activity Preservation
  
  The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe (in Minnesota) estimates that only about 90 fluent speakers of remain of their variety of Ojibwe. The goal here is to assist in teaching future generations to be bilingual, preserving linguistic heritage while being proficient in English. The team will record traditional stories and songs about their history, spiritual wisdom, cultural activities, and life skills while they are being practiced, narrated, and explained by fluent speakers, elders, and adult mentors.
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• Ruth Rouvier and Susan Gehr The Karuk Tribe

  Karuk Master-Apprentice Documentation Project Expansion Plan
  
  This proposal is the Bright Award winner. Bill Bright was a Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at UCLA and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His lifelong research and greatest contribution to the field was his study of the Native American language Karuk, a Northern Hokan language spoken by a small group in northwestern California. The Bill Bright Memorial Fund commemorates his work and is awarded to projects consistent with his linguistic interests. This year’s award is especially appropriate given the long involvement that Bill had with the language and the tribe, starting with his first field trip in 1949. The Karuk Tribe, from the mountains of Northern California, currently has 3,508 enrolled members. The tribe’s ancestral territory is in geographically isolated spans of the Klamath River. There are approximately eight fluent speakers of Karuk, and at least five children are being raised with Karuk as their first language. The Karuk Master-Apprentice Documentation Project has already begun to train apprentices in language documentation, transcription, and analysis techniques. Together with their master speaker partners, the apprentices have started to compile twenty video recordings focusing on vocabulary. Vocabulary words are listed on the Karuk Dictionary Web site, and pronunciation sound files are being prepared as well. Recordings will include additional topics, such as personal narratives, cultural descriptions, daily routines, conversations, and traditional stories. The recordings will be transcribed, analyzed, and disseminated by the apprentices, and podcasts will be produced to expand the distribution of the materials to the extended community of Karuk descendants. This award will fund a new master-apprentice team in Yreka, CA. Master speaker Lucille Albers will partner with her granddaughter, Tamara Alexander, who studies early childhood education. Together they will focus on language pertaining to childrearing, use of traditional baby baskets, and children’s stories.
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• Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo Kenyatta University, Kenya

  Living on Borrowed Time; Giving a Lifeline to the Olusuba Language of Kenya through Orature
  
  The Suba people are currently settled on the northeastern shore of Lake Victoria, Mfangano Island, and Rusinga Island, Kenya. The reported number of Suba varies from source to source, but it is clear that over the last half a century, many Olusuba speakers have become multilingual (Olusuba, English, Kiswahili, Luo) or bilingual (Olusuba, Luo). Over time, many began abandoning Olusuba and adopting the Luo language Dholuo as their language of choice, some losing the ability to speak their native language. The Government of Kenya’s population census, conducted in 1999, indicates that the number of monolingual speakers is 2,200. This award will fund the documentation of Olusuba oral literature and folklore, including fairy tales, proverbs, riddles, and tongue twisters. For a period of eight months, the researcher, a native Dholuo speaker, and two research assistants will live among and interact with the most fluent Olusuba speakers, producing audio and video recordings and transcribing and editing the collected materials. The fieldwork will result in a linguistic database with lexical, phonological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic information. Project findings and recordings will be complied on a CD that, it is hoped, will become a valuable pedagogical resource.
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• Carolina Coelho Aragon University of Utah

  Documentation of Akuntsú
  
  The Akuntsú tribe is currently located near the Omerê River in Rondônia, Brazil where its members settled after experiencing a devastating genocide. Only six members of the tribe survived, all of whom are monolingual speakers of Akuntsú. The tribe was first contacted in 1996 by the National Indian Foundation. None of the survivors have or plan to have children, and the tribe will disappear. These circumstances prompted linguistic documentation of Akuntsú to commence in 2004. This award will fund additional fieldwork focusing on syntactic analysis while refining the morphology, improving the phonology description, and recording ethnographic materials relating to tribal songs, folktales, oral traditions, religious ceremonies, and other cultural activities. Given that the six remaining Akuntsú are monolingual, the fieldwork will consist of the researcher living with the group, participating in daily activities and asking questions in Akuntsú rather than relying on conventional linguistic elicitation techniques. The long-term objective of this project is the creation of a complete reference grammar and a dictionary.
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• Tammy Goss, Jim Thunder, Billy Daniels, and Mary Jane Thunder University of Wisconsin / Forest County Potawatomi

  Potawatomi Dictionary Project
  
  Potawatomi was historically spoken by Native American tribes in Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The known speakers of Potawatomi include eight individuals from the Forest County Potawatomi in Wisconsin, three from the Prairie Band in Kansas, and possibly several more from the Citizen Potawatomi in Oklahoma. In this project, members of the Forest County Potawatomi and linguists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison will collaborate to produce and publish a bilingual dictionary of Potawatomi. The award will be used to conduct fieldwork in Forest County, to obtain digital recording equipment, and create a computer database for the dictionary. Fieldwork will include interviews with and recordings of three fluent native Potawatomi speakers who will also aid researchers in verifying and standardizing lexical items.
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• Marsha Relyea Miles and Steven Dazim Pioneer Bible Translators / Aruamu Community

  Aruamu BIG BOOK Project
  
  Aruamu is spoken by approximately 10,000 people in the rain forest of Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. This project focuses on developing the reading skills of Aruamu children. To this end, an alphabet has been developed and tested, and literacy courses have already taken place. The BIG BOOK Project will address the need for literacy and instructional materials in Aruamu classrooms. Big Books will include text and images large enough for the entire class to see and topics will range from Aruamu folktales and customs familiar to the children to practical everyday life stories, such as on nutrition, local politics, and how to treat a snakebite. The goal of the project is to provide sixteen Aruamu community-based preschool classrooms with a set of 56 Big Books. These books will make it possible for three hundred Aruamu children each year to learn to read their native language.
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• Tanis C. Thorne, Michael L. Connolly, Richard L. Carrico, and Richard Bugbee University of California, Irvine / San Diego State University

  “Place-Making:” Mapping Kumeyaay Place–names
  
  This project seeks to collect indigenous place–names in the Ipaay and Tipaay dialects of Kumeyaay, also known as Diegueño, spoken in Baja California, Mexico and San Diego County, California. The primary researcher, Tanis Thorne, has consulted archival materials, archeological records, ethnographic, linguistic, and historical sources, and memories of Kumeyaay people to develop interactive maps that convey the indigenous view of the landscape. The ELF award will be used to conduct interviews in Mexico and San Diego County with tribal consultants, representatives from the last generation familiar with both the significant sites and their indigenous names. Verifying documentary sources with tribe members and visiting the sites are critical to completing the mapping process. A major challenge of such an undertaking is to locate the sites on contemporary maps using GPS technology and GIS software. Project findings will be made available on a Web site containing maps, place–names, and their significance for the tribe.
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• Richard Pouliot Gedakina, Inc

  Bagadal8mow8gannawal, Bringing Back Our Songs
  
  Gedakina is an organization that encourages and promotes cultural identity among Native American youth and families in northern New England through traditional cultural teachings. The organization also seeks to conserve Native American land and sacred sites. Gedakina’s programs are available primarily to youth from the Abenaki,?Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy tribal nations in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. “Bringing Back Our Songs” is a program that focuses on traditional tribal songs relating to ceremony, healing, harvesting, planting, and other traditional activities. The goal of the program is to use these songs to revitalize community gatherings and the indigenous language. Youth learn ceremonial and social songs from fluent speakers, and together they write new songs of greater relevance for the younger generation. Hand drums are an integral part of this tradition, and the program participants attend a multi-day summer camp, free of charge, where they make their own hand drums and learn how to care for them. The camps also include language instruction and leadership and team building activities. The program continues with monthly drum circles taking place in the participants’ home communities.
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• Defen Yu Yunnan Nationalities University, Kunming, China

  The Documentation of Zijun Samadu, a Tibeto-Burman Language of China
  
  This project will develop a grammatical description of Zijun Samadu, which is spoken by approximately four hundred people in the village of Zijun in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. It will also produce a corpus of annotated texts and a word list to be included in the grammar book, digital video recordings of native speakers, and pedagogical materials for teaching Samadu language and culture to the younger generation. The award will fund twelve weeks of fieldwork in Zijun Samadu during which Samadu conversations and stories will be recorded and transcribed and four weeks of fieldwork in Zhenkang and Yongde where texts written in the Western Samadu dialect will be collected and analyzed. DVDs containing project materials, including the video recordings, will be distributed in the area, where DVD players abound.
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• Pilar M. Valenzuela Chapman University

  Awakening Shiwilu Voices
  
  Shiwilu, also known as Jebero, is spoken in the Amazon in northeastern Peru. Approximately 20 elders speak Shiwilu, the youngest fluent speaker being about sixty years old. This language revitalization project will take place in conjunction with a documentation project funded by a National Science Foundation grant. The goals of “Awakening Shiwilu Voices” are to encourage the use of Shiwilu among the fluent elders and among speakers with more limited knowledge, to produce a collection of audio recordings and pedagogical materials for teaching Shiwilu as a second language, and to teach Shiwilu to a group of thirty children. Conversation sessions will be led by Mr. Meneleo Careajano, a Shiwilu cultural leader. Mr. Careajano and other participants will be trained in recording, transcribing, and translating ethnographic materials. These materials will be used for language instruction and will be made available, along with their Spanish translations, on a specially designed Web site for use by linguists, social scientists, and the general public.
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• Anita Heard Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways, The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan

  Mnaajchigaadenoon Ngamwinan. Celebrating Songs Harvest Project
  
  There are 3,460 members of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe located in Isabella County, Michigan where less than five fluent native speakers of Anishinabemowin (Ojibwe Language) remain. The Ziibiwing Center is a cultural learning center that seeks to preserve and perpetuate the tribe’s culture and language. The theme of this year’s activities at the center is: “Celebrating Songs: Mnaajchigaadenoon Ngamwinan.” In this context, the center wishes to obtain re-recordings of wax cylinders of traditional Ojibwe songs made by ethnographer and ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore between 1904 and 1910. These recordings are currently housed at the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Culture. This award will fund the acquisition of duplications of selected Densmore recordings and accompanying field notes. The recordings will enrich the language resources available at the Ziibiwing Center. They will be integrated into the center’s archives and incorporated into language instruction programs for youth and adults.
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• Amy Campbell, Ramón Escamilla, Lindsey Newbold, and Justin Spence University of California, Berkeley

  University of California, Berkeley
  
  With fewer than five first-language speakers remaining, none younger than 60, Hupa (Pacific Coast Athabaskan) is a critically endangered language. The language is fluently spoken by only a handful of elderly speakers, few of whom use it on a day-to-day basis; it is now mainly used in ceremonial contexts, such as for offering prayers at community events. In recent decades, the Hoopa Valley Tribe has been actively engaged in efforts to reverse the obsolescence of their language. The tribe supports Hupa second-language classes in the elementary and high schools and at the adult level, and there is now a small but growing number of second-language speakers. Although Hupa morphophonology has been described, very little work has been done on syntax, semantics or discourse phenomena. This project will contribute to a complete description and documentation of the language by producing a corpus of transcribed, annotated, and analyzed texts from a variety of speech genres, with associated digital audio and video recordings. The corpus will be accessible through a simple, web-based search interface, suitable for use by language learners and linguistic researchers.
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• Marit Vamarasi Marit Vamarasi

  Training Rotuman Language Teachers
  
  Rotuman is spoken by approximately 2,500 people on the island of Rotuma in the South Pacific, and by 7,500 more in overseas communities in Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada. Whereas at one time nearly all Rotuman people spoke their language, migration in recent decades has taken its toll. Transmitting the language to the younger generation presents special challenges since many of the speakers of Rotuman are dispersed in communities across the globe. The present project seeks to trains Rotuman speakers to teach their language, using both electronic and written materials, including a teacher’s manual for native speakers with no background in language teaching. The instruction will take place in after-school or weekend classes. The program will begin in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Vamarasi will begin training several teachers, and it will be brought to other parts of the Rotuman diaspora from there. This project will benefit the Rotuman community by giving them the tools to teach their own language and by creating opportunities for the children to learn the language. These materials will also be of interest to linguists who are interested in learning about the structural properties of this unique language.
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• Thiago Costa Chacon University of Utah

  Kubeo Documentation Project
  
  The Kubeo language, also known as Cubeo, Kubewa, and Pamíwa, is spoken in the Vaupes region of southeastern Colombia. This project’s aims are to produce a reference grammar of Kubeo, and to provide the Kubeo community with a practical grammar, dictionary, and pedagogical resources. Fieldwork research and the production of these materials will be carried mainly by Thiago Costa Chacon, a PhD student and research assistant at the Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL, University of Utah), in cooperation with Kubeo speakers. The specific goals of this project are to collect Kubeo lexical and grammatical data, prepare of specific pedagogical materials, and answer indigenous representative demands.The Kubeo Documentation Project involves a partnership between CAIL and Kubeo leaders and school teachers through the Federation of Indigenous Organizations from the Rio Negro (FOIRN), the main indigenous organization of the Brazilian North West Amazon.
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• Jane Freeland and Eloy Frank Gómez University of Southampton / Universidad de las Regiones Autónomas de las Costa Caribe Nicaragüense

  Developing materials to train Mayangna Indian sociolinguistic / ethnographic researchers into community attitudes to language loss
  
  The purpose of this project is to train a team of Mayangna indigenous researchers to conduct sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnography research into the social and cultural causes of language shift among the Mayangna through a staged sequence of guided, hands-on research. The language of the Mayangna Indians, which linguists refer to as Northern Sumu, comprises two varieties, Panamahka and Tuahka, in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) of Nicaragua, and a third variety, Tahuahka, in the Honduran Mosquitia. There are currently estimated to be 12,000 Panamahka-speakers and 2,000 Tuahka-speakers, though no reliable census has been made. This project will produce a team of indigenous Mayangna researchers trained in sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnography techniques and report writing, an archived corpus of naturally produced language of various dialogic genres (conversation, group discussion, autobiographical narrative), a corpus of Mayangna popular discourse on language, and a good sense of what the Mayangna consider to be the most important sociolinguistic and ethnographic questions relating to their language and its varieties.
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• Paulina Yourupi University of Hawaii at Manoa

  Developing a Pollapese Orthography
  
  Pollapese is an Austronesian language spoken on the atoll of Pollap in Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia. Half of the 905 speakers (according to the 2000 census), live outside of Pollap. Yourupi will document the language in various settings and archive her data so that they are accessible to linguists, native speakers of Pollapese who want to develop pedagogical materials, their descendants, and the wider public. This project will focus specifically on developing a Pollapese orthography, one that is accepted, endorsed, and implemented by the speech community on Pollap. This writing system will be constructed based on two existing writing systems, the Chuukese Orthography and the Mortlockese spelling system, which were developed by missionaries to create the Chuukese Bible. Yourupi’s orthography and her repository of Pollapese material will aid not only linguists and native speakers but also their descendants and researchers in other disciplines.
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• Marine Vuillermet Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (DDL)

  Saving the "Sloth Woman Myth": a Collaborative Project in Bolivia
  
  Ese Ejja is a language of the Takanan family spoken in northern Bolivia and southeastern Peru. There are no more than 4000 speakers of all of the Takanan languages combined. This project on the ‘Sloth Woman Myth,’ a famous story that recounts the creation of the world, is the first concrete step towards a multidisciplinary and cross-border documentation project on the language. The goal of the project is to recover a full version of the myth from an elderly speaker, the only one known to still remember it well. Vuillemet will record the myth and make it available for distribution and use in the community in video and print format. These materials represent a valuable source of literacy that is an alternative to the Bibles and booklets provided by missionaries. This myth presents syntactic features only present in mythic discourse, and therefore it is of value to linguists as well. It is also a valuable resource to evaluate dialectal divergence, as a different form of the language has already has been recorded in Peru.
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• Benson Oduor Ojwang Maseno University

  Promoting Documentation and Maintenance of Kinubi, a Minority Creole in Kenya
  
  Kinubi is spoken in Kenya by the Nubi linguistic minority of about 10,000 people. This tribe has maintained a distinct identity as a speech community despite the fact that they are third generation immigrants who have not been recognized by the government. There are very few written materials in Kinubi, and the literacy rate in the language is below 1%. The Nubi have not been given official recognition as a distinct community with a unique culture, language, history, religion and tradition, and there is no repository for the language and culture of the Nubi people. Ojwang’s project will examine the vitality of the language, identify indicators of language shift among the Nubi, observe the language choices in various domains and develop wordlists and recorded texts of stories in Kinubi. The texts will be published as basic readers for school-aged Nubi children.
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• Jermy Imanuel Balukh Cakrawala Nusantara Kupang

  Documenting Folk Tales and Procedural Texts in Ndao
  
  This project will create a collection of Ndao folk tales and procedural texts describing the use of traditional tools and activities such as weaving, tapping lontar-palm, and metal handwork, as well as a wordlist of up to 2000 entries. Balukh will attempt to publish the reading materials and the glossary through the local government as an alternative to the religious texts provided by missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. These texts will be available for use by the Ndao communities as well as by linguists as preliminary data for further research on the grammatical analysis of Ndao and the production of reading material for both public and educational purposes. Ndao is an Austronesian language spoken by about 3000 people, mainly on the islands of Ndao and Nuse, in East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. Speakers of Ndao also live in the neighboring islands of Rote, Timor, and Flores.
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• Strang Burton Stolo Nation

  Elizabeth Herrling Collection of Upriver Halq’emeylem
  
  Upriver Halq’emeylem is one of three major dialects of Halkomelem, a Salishan language spoken in Southern British Columbia, Canada. there are currently two living native speakers, including Elizabeth Herrling, who is now 93 years old. Herrling is the last speaker of the Seabird sub-dialect. While working for the Stolo Shxweli Halq’emeylem language program, Burton has been recording and transcribing short texts provided by Elizabeth Herrling. These texts are of two types: stories from Herrling’s life and the lives of her families, and stories that Herrling narrates based on sketches, pictures, and slide show presentations. The goal of this project is to organize the existing corpus of recordings and transcriptions and to commit it to a reliable archive. This will involve formatting and indexing the materials and transcribing the rest of the recordings. This project is important for making this set of materials--a significant collection, told by one of the very last speakers of this language--available to meet the needs of both scholars and the community.
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• Linda Lanz Rice University

  Inupiaq Revitalization and Documentation: Digital Resources for an Indigenous Community
  
  To honor the legacy of linguist Bill Bright, the Endangered Language Fund, in conjunction with members of Bill's family, has created an award for a proposal that extends his research interests and work. These include areal interest in North and Central America as well as South Asia, and a broad range of topical interests. (See www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/bright.html for details.) This year's Bill Bright award goes to Linda Lanz of Rice University for her project, Inupiaq Revitalization and Documentation: Digital Resources for an Indigenous Community. Inupiaq is a moribund Inuit Eskimo-Aleut language spoken by an estimated 3,000 people in northern Alaska. It will almost certainly become extinct within one or two generations unless significant revitalization efforts are made. Despite a good deal of documentation of Eskimo-Aleut languages in general, few works deal with Inupiaq; typically the language is omitted or treated as Inuktitut with a different name. This project will fill large gaps in the existing Inupiaq documentation, particularly morphophonology and morphosyntax. In addition, Ms. Lanz will work with community members to produce materials and linguistic documentation of the Malimiut dialect, which has often been ignored in favor of the better-described North Slope dialect. The research generated by this project will be used to create language revitalization resources for the Inupiaq speaker community.
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• Heather Souter Camperville, Manitoba, Canada

  Michif Video Memories: Documenting Language and Culture in Context
  
  The Michif language came into existence in the early 19th century as a result of contact between Cree and Ojibwe speaking nations and French fur traders in the Red River Valley of Manitoba, Canada. The Metis, the offspring of these mixed unions, were identified as a new ethnic group as early as the first decade of the 1800s, and it is likely that their language, Michif, was born around this time. Emigration and dispersion of the Metis took place over the next century, and today the language is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota. Most of these speakers are over 70 years old, and the language is not being passed on to the younger generations. Ms. Souter, a member of the Manitoba Metis Association, will carry out a language and culture video documentation project to document traditional and daily activities carried out by Michif-speaking elders. She will produce a short documentary on the use of the language in cultural activities, and her work will be available to linguists and Metis community members.
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• Alejandra Vidal Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas, Argentina

  Documenting Pilaga: Community Language Archiving in Formosa
  
  The Pilaga people live near the Pilcomayo River in the Formosa province of northeastern Argentina. Their language, a member of the Guaycuru family, is spoken by between 4,000 and 6,000 people. Dr. Vidal will study Pilaga non-narrative discourse and generate audio/video documentation of language use. The project will record, videotape, transcribe, analyze, and distribute a corpus of data in digital form, covering a variety of genres and interactions. These data will give insight into the language as used naturally between speakers, instead of in the context of narration. The data will be archived and made available to linguists, community members, and language teachers in a variety of formats.
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• Heriberto Avelino University of Toronto

  Audiovisual Documentation of the Kiliwa Languag
  
  The goal of this project is to create an audiovisual record of the Kiliwa language of Baja California, Mexico. The language is spoken by 5 people among the 54 identified as belonging to the Kiliwa ethnic group, which has seen the marginalization of their language intensified by deforestation of the already semi-desert area, climate change, a rapidly increasing migrant population, and cultural pressure from the dominant Mexican and U.S. media. The researcher will produce a collection of digital records in the form of video and audio recordings of oral texts of the language. The texts collected will preserve important cultural information and provide a window into the history and culture of the Kiliwa people and of the region. The documentation will also be available the community as a crucial element in the revitalization of the language.
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• Tsuyoshi Ono University of Alberta

  Digital Documentation of Ikema Language Use
  
  This project will document the use of Ikema, a language spoken on a small island of the same name near Okinawa, Japan. Distant from mainland Japan, located only 180 miles from Taiwan, Ikema is an island with a decreasing population of about 750, comprising mostly elderly people. The youngest speakers of the language are over 60 years old. Ikema has been classified as a dialect of Japanese, but Dr. Ono believes it is a distinct language. People on the island still remember the hoogen fuda 'dialect placard' which they were forced to wear when they slipped into their own language. The project will generate recordings and documentation of the language as it is currently used, with both Ikema and Standard Japanese within conversations and sentences. Documenting this code-switching will help us understand the use of the language in a minority situation and highlight the daily use of the languages for the benefit of linguists and the Ikema speakers and their descendents.
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• Viktoria Papp Rice University

  Northern Csango Language Documentation: Voice and Information Structure
  
  Northern Csango, the closest relative of Hungarian, is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by fewer than 3,000 people in Northeastern Romania. Since settling east of the Carpathian Mountains around the 13th century, the Csangos have lived in Romania and have had little contact with Standard Hungarian. Their language has gone largely undocumented. Linguistically analyzable recordings have not been made, and the existing studies have not accounted for the differences in the dialects of Northern Csango. Ms. Papp has compiled extensive recordings and word lists from the language during previous field trips. The goal of this project is to work with a group of speakers to complete a grammar and a dictionary, and to continue recording and archiving stories and oral histories for community use.
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• Armik Mirzayan University of Colorado at Boulder

  Documenting the Wichita Language in Music
  
  Wichita is a Caddoan language spoken by a fewer than five elderly people near Anadarko, Oklahoma. The language is extremely endangered, yet recordings of texts and singing made of now deceased speakers can be understood and repeated by these few living speakers. Most questions about grammar and the meaning of the forms can be resolved in this way, as long as there are fluent speakers still living. Mr. Mirzayan will visit the speakers of Wichita and use their understanding of the recorded texts and songs to help analyze the rich morphosyntactic structure of the language. The realm of music is one of the last cultural niches in which the Wichita language is heard and spoken frequently. The primary goal of this project, therefore, is to build a digital database of Wichita songs and music that contain as much of the usage of the Wichita language as possible. The material collected under this project will supplement existing video and audio archives of elicited and conversational Wichita (Rood and Mirzayan, 2000-2005), funded by the VolkswagenStiftung's DoBeS project. The recordings of Wichita songs and texts will also be made available to the tribe.
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• Michael Hughes and Jule Gomez de Garcia California State University, San Marcos

  Linguistic Database of Men's Ixil Mayan Narratives
  
  Ixil Mayan is spoken by around 70,000 people in the highlands of northern Guatemala. While the language is healthy among adult speakers, the presence of Spanish monolingual children in Ixil homes indicates a language shift pattern. Dr. Hughes will travel to Guatemala to collect video and audio documentation of Ixil Mayan narratives. The current Mayan Women's Literacy Project, which has compiled a number of transcriptions of natural conversation in Ixil Mayan with the assistance of a women's group in Nebaj, has resulted in a significant linguistic database of naturally occurring discourse among women. Dr. Hughes' project will complement the work of the Mayan Women's Literacy Project, funded by the U. S. National Science Foundation, by creating a database of men's discourse, which draws on a different range of vocabulary and grammatical structures. Ixil Mayan men may also observe different sociolinguistic norms and conversation styles, and it is important to make a record of these aspects of Ixil Mayan in order to describe the language fully.
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• Wilson de Lima Silva University of Utah

  Practical Language Material for Desano
  
  Following on last year's successful ELF project in the same region, Wilson Silva will travel to the Upper Rio Negro region of Brazil to produce a booklet of traditional Desano stories. These stories will aid in the educational and revitalization programs being developed by the community members and FOIRN (Federacao das Organizacoes Indigenas do Rio Negro). Desano is an Eastern Tukanoan language spoken by a small number of people among the fewer than 1,600 who belong to the Desano ethnic group. FOIRN and Desano leaders report that the Desano people in Brazil generally speak only Tukano, instead of their own language, and that there are no speakers under the age of 25. The language materials will be based on stories collected in audio and video format from 6 communities in the Desano-speaking area. These materials will then be distributed in the communities for educational use.
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• Sarah Murray Rutgers University

  Dynamics of Cheyenne Discourse
  
  The goal of this project is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of two features of Cheyenne discourse: reflexivity/reciprocity and evidentiality. In both respects, Cheyenne has interesting structures that have not yet been thoroughly studied. The researcher will collect data from the speakers and produce 10 glossed and translated texts for purposes of analysis. According to the 2000 census data, Cheyenne is spoken by a combined population of nearly 1,600 people in Montana and Oklahoma, most of whom are older adults. The children of these communities do not currently learn the language. Ms. Murray's research will be made available to the communities, and her work will contribute to the theory of natural language semantics and pragmatics as well as to the revitalization of Cheyenne.
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• Erin Debenport University Of Chicago

  Community Language Documentation At Sandia Pueblo
  
  The Southern Tiwa language revitalization program at Sandia Pueblo, New Mexico, serves the community by teaching the language to the tribal members. This project will expand the existing program by creating new opportunities for participation by community members. This goal will be accomplished in two ways: by training community members to enter dictionary information into the online database, and by creating an editorial group of native speakers to edit and expand the document. The language has little history of documentation, so this work will represent a valuable contribution to the understanding of the Kiowa Tanoan language family. Sandia Southern Tiwa is spoken 10 miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, by 43 fluent speakers out of a tribal enrollment of approximately 500.
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• Pastor Dawari Braide

  Printing Of Kalabari-English Dictionary For Kalabari Children
  
  The Endangered Language Fund gave Pastor Dawari Braide, a 2005 ELF grant recipient, another grant this year to publish the bilingual dictionary that has been the product of his work on the Kalabari language. Pastor Braide's work last year produced language materials for teaching the Kalabari language to the community members. The dictionaries will be used by Kalabari children in the city of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, near the delta of the Niger River. The Kalabari language is a Niger-Congo language spoken by 258,000 people, endangered largely because of the massive relocation that has taken place in the area due to the developement of Nigeria's oil industry in the Port Harcourt region. Thanks to the work of Pastor Braide, the children of the Kalabari communities have access to printed and online language resources. Click here to learn about Pastor Braide's 2005 project.
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• Amrendra Kumar Singh Jawaharlal Nehru University

  Description Of Pasi
  
  The Pasi language is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by fewer than 1,000 people in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The language is endangered due to the influence of Hindi and English in the region, and intermarriage among the various groups in the area have put the language in a precarious position. In the Siang district, which border China and Assam in the far northeast corner of the country, the complex of languages to which Pasi belongs has been described simply as the "Adi language group." According to more recent research, the linguistic situation in the area seems considerably more complex. The researcher will travel to the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh to write the first descriptive grammar of Pasi and to clarify the relationships between the various languages and dialects of the Adi language group.
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• Khawaja Rehman Frontier Language Institute

  Language Maintenance And Shift In Kundal Shahi
  
  In the area surrounding the Kundal Shahi village in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, most people speak the Hindko language. In the village, however, a large section of the population speaks a distinct language, which might descend from an ancient form of the Shina language. Over the past 40 years, the speakers of this language have begun to speak Hindko, whereas in the past they maintained a stable balance between the two languages. The current speaker population is estimated at 500 out of an ethnic group of around 2,000. Some of the speakers left the village following the devastating earthquake of October 2005, accelerating the rate of language shift. Mr. Rehman plans to archive the community's oral traditions, write a grammar and glossary, form a Kundal Shahi language preservation society, and document the changing language attitudes that have led to the language's recent decline.
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• Robert Williams American University in Cairo

  Ghulfan Language Documentation Through Forced Migration Stories
  
  Due to the various political and geographical factors that have made it difficult for linguists to work in rural Sudan, many of the indigenous Sudanese languages have not been adequately described. The same political factors have now forced tens of thousands of Sudanese people to migrate, many of them to Cairo, which gives Dr. Williams a rare opportunity to document the forced migration narratives of Ghulfan language speakers. Ghulfan, known as Ajang among the group that migrated to Cairo, is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by around 16,000 people in the Sudanese state of Northern Kordofan. Dr. Williams will make digital video and audio recordings of the language to be used both for linguistic analysis and for the benefit of the relocated Ghulfan communities. These recordings will also be of use to people interested in the recent Sudanese migration to other parts of Northern Africa.
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• Jerry Hall Lane Community College

  Tutudin Language Camp
  
  Tutudin is an Athabaskan language currently spoken by two elderly people in southwestern Oregon. The current project will offer the chance for community members to participate in a week long summer Tutudin language camp and receive guidance from one of the last living speakers. In the recent years of the Tutudin language camp, the community has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of people involved in learning the language. This summer's participants will gather in Agness, Oregon, and practice the language through classes, songs, games, and cultural tours to important sites in the area, including battle sites, villages, ceremonial grounds, and museums. They will also take part in traditional experiences such as basket making, sweat lodge ceremonies, and crafting hunting and fishing tools.
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• Simeon Floyd University Of Texas At Austin

  Multi-Dialect Documentation of Highland Ecuadorian Quichua
  
  This project will produce a transcribed text collection of Ecuadorian Quichua corresponding to approximately ten hours of digital video documentation of discourse in four distinct dialects of the language. The result of the project will be the creation of a large corpus of naturally-occurring Quichua discourse representing a range of dialects and speaking styles, from stories to interviews to conversations of many kinds. Collaborative transcription and data processing by a native Quichua speaker and a U.S. graduate student will create an archival source with which to do descriptive linguistic analysis as well as to create texts and digital media for community use. The Quichua language is still spoken in most of the Ecuadorian highlands, but language shift has been an ongoing process for centuries and is currently proceeding at an unprecedented rate. Linguistic manifestations of racism against the indigenous people are prominent, and children have been pressured to use Spanish instead of Quichua. This project will help the speakers counter language shift and strengthen linguistic and cultural trasmission through textual and audiovisual media.
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• Wilson de Lima Silva University Of Utah

  Documentation Of Arapaso
  
  The goal of this project is to document Arapaso, a previously undocumented Tukanoan language spoken by a fewer than 300 people in the Upper Rio Negro region of Brazil. The researcher will produce a typological overview of the language based on the analysis of texts and lexical materials collected from the communities. Using phonological, morphological, and syntactic analysis, the Dr. Silva will provide the first comprehensive description of the language. The data that are generated from the project, which will be in the form of audio and video recordings, will be available online to the Arapaso people at the Amazonian Museum in Manaus. The work will also be accessible to the scientific community, through the CAIL archives at the University of Utah, and through AILLA at the University of Texas at Austin.
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• Joana Jansen University Of Oregon

  Documenting Yakima Sahaptin Conversation
  
  The Yakima Sahaptin language is spoken by fewer than 10 people in and around the Yakama Indian Reservation in central Washington State. It is one of several Sahaptin dialects, which are mutually intelligible and syntactically similar, with differences in orthography, phonology, and lexicon. This project will complement previously completed work on Yakima, which has been based on legends and personal narratives, with very little interaction between native speakers. The current project will record, transcribe, analyze and distribute a corpus of conversational data in digital video and audio form from several fluent first-language speakers of Yakima Sahaptin. These data will give insight into the language as used between people, instead of in the context of narration. The data will be available to linguists, community members, and language teachers in a variety of formats.
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• Racquel Yamada University Of Oregon

  University Of Oregon
  
  The purpose of this project is to collect text data from native speakers of the Murato dialect of Carib who live in the village of Donderskamp, Suriname. Carib, also known as Karinya, is spoken by about 10,000 people in Venezuela, French Guiana, Brazil, Guyana, and Suriname, and among this group, 20 speakers live in Donderskamp. The project will provide training and technological resources to the village leaders, who will record their own texts. This locally-based data gathering process will empower the people of Donderskamp to take the future of the language into their own hands. Products of the project will support current and planned language revitalization efforts and will contribute to the linguistic understanding of Cariban languages.
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• Erich Fox Tree

  Mesoamerican Sign Language Survival And Documentation Project: Modern Signs, Ancient Histories
  
  Meemul Ch'aab'al is the K'ichee'-Mayan name for a complex of indigenous natural sign languages used widely throughout the Maya area of Mesoamerica. In recent years, Dr. Fox Tree has worked to determine whether these languages actually constitutes an ancient sign language family. Most of the languages of the Meemul Ch'aab'al complex have been overlooked by linguists and anthropologists. The existing scholarship has suggested that the languages came into existence in the early 20th century, but Dr. Fox Tree's research indicates that they come from an ancient and indigenous source; the sign languages are referenced in colonial Spanish documents and depicted in Maya iconography dating as far back as the Pre-Classic Period. It is possible that these are the oldest documentable sign languages in the world, over four times older than the earliest records of the national sign languages of Europe and the USA. This project will clarify the history of these unusual languages and document their structures.
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• Laureano Segovia

  Documenting Wichi Language and Traditional Culture
  
  Laureano Segovia is a native speaker of Wichi, a Matacoan language spoken in the southern Chaco region of Argentina and southeastern Bolivia. The Wichi were formerly hunter-gatherers who were forced to settle in communities and lead sedentary lives after European contact. The communities in eastern Salta were able to lead traditional lifestyles until the middle of the 20th century, when they were encouraged by Anglican missionaries to settle in communities between the Pilcomayo and Bermejo rivers. The last Wichi who lived in the traditional lifestyle and practiced their traditional customs and ceremonies are now in their 60's and 70's. Most of the young members of the communities have no knowledge of the oral traditions or traditional practices. The main goal of the project is to document the speakers of Wichi in the Eastern Salta area, focusing on those who still remember the traditional lifestyle. Based on the recorded interviews, a printed collection of their accounts will be produced primarily for the native Wichi communities in the area. Several texts, transcribed and morphologically analyzed in Spanish and English, will be available online. The researchers will establish a website for Wichi, with information about the speakers, the language, the communities, and the current efforts in language maintenance.
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• Elena V. Perekhvalskaya St. Petersburg State University

  Online Documentation of Udihe
  
  The Udihe language belongs to the Southern group of the Tungus-Manchu language family, a branch of Altaic. The modern Udihe live in several multi-ethnic settlements scattered over an extensive territory in the Ussuri taiga in the southern part of the Russian Far East. Udihe is spoken by no more than 100 people, but there has been a recent effort to revitalize the language, and many members of the community are working together to maintain what is left of the speaker population. The current project proposes to create a multimedia collection of linguistic and cultural information on Udihe available for public use on the internet. The documentation will include original texts, both as audio recordings, and in transcribed, translated and analyzed form, as well as dictionaries and pictures. A thorough compilation of morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and entries will be available electronically. The goal of the project is to make all of the information obtained on the ELF grant accessible to Udihe speakers by transferring the user’s version of the documentation to CDs which can be distributed in the Udihe communities, in which computer knowledge is becoming more and more widespread, and circumstances permitting, by creating smaller versions of the dictionary in printed form for distribution in local schools.
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• Andrew Garrett, Melodie George, and Victor Golla University of California, Berkeley; Hoopa Valley High School; Humboldt State University / University of California. Davis

  A Returning Fluent Hupa Speaker: Documentation and Digital Language Materials
  
  Hupa, an Athabaskan language spoken in and near Hoopa Valley in northwestern California, has eight fluent speakers, all of whom are elderly. There is an active Hupa language program, offering classes in the Hoopa Valley High School as well as evening community classes for people of all ages. The program is successful, but now that the language is used only rarely and in restricted functional domains, it is natural that today’s Hupa speakers do not show the same stylistic range and do not exploit the language’s considerable morphosyntactic complexity to the same degree as speakers of their parents’ generation. This year, though, a fluent Hupa speaker who has not been part of the speech community for many decades has returned to Hoopa Valley and has taken an active interest in the tribal language program. Surprisingly, her level of proficiency and control of the complex grammar and style are reminiscent of the oldest speakers of twenty or thirty years ago, and she is making important contributions to local language teaching. The current project will involve a systematic documentation of the returning speaker’s language, the development of the recordings as educational resources, and an exploration into the long-term linguistic effects of isolation from a speech community on an individual’s use of language.
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• Joel Nasveira Simo Vanuatu National Language Committee

  Reviving Vanuatu's Dying Languages
  
  The Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu is home to 115 languages spoken among its 120,000 residents, giving it far and away the highest linguistic diversity per capita of any country in the world. The Mores language, spoken by around 75 people, is one of 32 languages spoken on the island of Santo. Mores has never been studied, and there has never been an attempt to develop an orthography for the language. Many of speakers have recently committed to work together, under the leadership of two of the community elders, to preserve and strengthen the language. Joel Simo plans to make recordings of the language to be used for analysis of the grammar and phonology, as well as an archive of the oral history. He will also compile a wordlist and a sketch of the grammar, which will form the basis for developing literacy materials to be used in Mores language classes. These advances will be facilitated by an orthographic system agreed upon by the community.
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• Mark Turin University of Cambridge

  Thangmi Shamanic Chants: Preserving An Endangered Ritual Language And Tradition From Nepal
  
  The Thangmi (Thami in Nepali) are a little-known and disadvantaged ethnic community of 23,000 indigenous to Nepal, but with significant populations in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, and in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. They speak an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of the same name, which is the closest relative of Newar, the language of the Kathmandu valley. In the course of Mark Turin's seven years of research on the language, he has collected over 100 oral narratives from the shamans, the exclusive ritual practitioners of the Thangmi community. The content of these texts is as linguistically unique as it is culturally salient. The narratives document the origin of the Thangmi people, explain the meaning of their clan names, contain the ritual structure of life-cycle rites (birth, marriage and death), and provide invaluable local knowledge of the medicinal uses of wild plants. In short, Thangmi shamans and their texts are the repository of the oral history of the people. In this project, Turin will transcribe and analyze these texts using the Nepali Unicode font and prepare a glossary of the riual lexicon and terminology used by Thangmi shamans for publication. The Nepali Thami Society has requested that the texts be made available locally and also hosted online.
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• Pastor Dawari Braid

  Documentation And Preservation Of The Kalabari Language For Posterity: Now And The Future
  
  Kalabari is a Niger-Congo language spoken by the people of the same name, in the Niger River delta of southern Nigeria. Since the 1950's, the residents of this area have migrated abroad and to other parts of Nigeria following the development of the oil industry and its negative impact on their ecosystems, and the fragmented community of speakers has had to rely on English to fill the gaps in its communication. The community is interested in maintaining what is left of the speaker population. Through the assistance of ELF, Pastor Braide is developing a web based bilingual lexicography of the Kalabari language to be used by the speakers, especially those in the Diaspora. Back at home, he intends to set up study centers in the urban centers to teach the language during school days and holidays. In the local schools, he will organize essay-writing competitions to promote literacy in Kalabari.
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• Rosa Vallejos University of Oregon

  Documenting The Language Of The Kokama-Kokamilla People
  
  The purpose of this project is to conduct fieldwork in two Kokama-Kokamilla communities in Peru and to collect text data from native speakers. Products of the project will contribute to ongoing language revitalization efforts and will be available to members of the community. The text collection will be valuable material for producing school materials and for training bilingual teachers in Kokama-Kokamilla and Spanish. The Kokama-Kokamilla people live in the Amazon, along the Huallaga, Maranon, Ucayali, Nanay, Samiria, and Amazon rivers. The ethnic population is approximately 20,000, but the language is spoken by no more than 1,500 people, all of whom are over 50. Small groups of Kokama speakers have also been reported in Brazil and Colombia; however, at present, this language is extinct in Colombia and very close to extinct in Brazil.
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• Gratien Gualbert Atindogbe University of Buea

  A Reference Grammar Of Barombi
  
  The Barombi is a language spoken by about 3,000 people living in southwestern Meme and Ndian regions of Cameroon. Barombi belongs to the Benue-Congo branch of the Bantu language family, and there has not yet been a thorough documentation of the language. This project aims at providing the Barombi speakers and any other interested researchers with an exhaustive grammatical book on the Barombi language. The book will be thorough enough to provide an adequate description of the language, but it will also be accessible as a resource to the community, to be used as an educational reference. In addition to his work on behalf of the Barombi-speaking community, Atindogbe also hopes to clarify the relationship between the Barombi and Bankon languages, and between the other Bantu languages of Cameroon.
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• John P. Boyle University of Chicago

  Hidatsa Language Documentation and Revitalization
  
  Hidatsa is a Siouan language spoken almost exclusively on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. There are approximately 75 speakers, most of whom are over the age of 50, and very little work has been done to document the language. John Boyle will develop a package of educational materials to be used by the middle and high school programs in Mandaree and New Town, North Dakota. He will begin by converting an earlier wordlist into a usable student dictionary, rendered in a new community-supported writing system, and he will go on to produce a student guide to Hidatsa verbs based on the "501 verbs" series. This list of regular and irregular verb forms will be of use to the community and to linguists who will be able to study the verb system. Finally, Boyle will produce a basic sketch of Hidatsa to give the learners an overview of the grammar and verb morphology. All of the materials will be of use both the Hidatsa community and to the linguistics community.
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• Jorge Gomez Rendon University of Amsterdam

  Documented Survey of Sia Pedee and Development of Basic Teaching Materials
  
  Sia Pedee (also known as Epera) is a Chocoan language of the Embera family spoken in the northern province of Esmereldas, Ecuador. There are around 250 speakers of Epera, mostly among the older generations. Unlike some of their neighbors, they do not have their own bilingual education program, in part because Epera has not been examined thoroughly. Jorge Gomez Rendon plans to conduct a linguistic and sociolinguistic survey and documentation of the language, which will include the development of an orthography for the language. He will also make an accurate assessment of the number of speakers, the degree and form of transmission to new generations, the spheres in which the language is used, and other aspects of the use and viability of the language. Audio and video recordings, with accompanying transcriptions, will be the principal medium of documentation, and the community will be trained in audio recording and text processing so that they can record and process material on their own. Selected recordings will be elaborated and incorporated as teaching materials to support a pilot bilingual education program.
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• Zelealem Leyew University of Addis Ababa

  Recording the Last Fluent Speakers of Kemantney
  
  The Kemant people, a group of mostly Orthodox Christian farmers, inhabit an area about 800 kilometers northwest of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. According to the 1994 census, there are around 1,625 speakers of Kemantney, but following the death of many of the older members of the community, the speaker population been reduced to only a few hundred. Most of the fluent speakers of Kemantney are in their 60's or above, and the well-known storytellers are older. The opportunity to find speakers who still enjoy excellent lexical and grammatical control of Kemantney makes the documentation of the language quite indispensable and urgent. The main focus of the research is to document the language by gathering, processing and archiving the data and producing a dictionary and transcribed texts, which will be made available as a resource to the members of the community who are interested in maintaining the use of the language.
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• Tyler Peterson University of British Columbia

  Video Documentation of Gitksan Narratives: Legends, Life Stories, and My Day
  
  The Gitksan people live in a number of communities situated in or near the valley of the Skeena River in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. There are approximately 50 fluent speakers remaining, and they represent the last opportunity to capture the finer-grained details and subtleties of the Gitksan language as it is spoken in relating forms of narrative. Tyler Peterson will document three specific manifestations of narrative form, none of which have been previously documented: traditional narratives and legends which have been passed through the generations, a story of the significant events of some of the speakers' lives, and the use of narratives related to daily living, which will reveal how the language has been adapted to express modern-day realities. Peterson has chosen to use video documentation to capture extra-linguistic data that often accompany narration, such as hand and body gestures, facial expressions, and other expressions that complement speech and are integral to the narration. The language data will be analyzed as part of the researcher's work at the University of British Columbia, and the recordings will be available for the use of the Gitksan community.
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• April Laktonen Counceller and Jeff Leer Alutiiq Museum and Archaelogical Repository, Alaska Native Language Center

  Kodiak Alutiiq Conversational Booklet and CD
  
  As part of local and regional efforts to create learning materials to help revitalize the Alutiiq language, Counceller and Leer will research, write and edit a conversational booklet and accompanying CD for second-language learners. Alutiiq is an Eskimo-Aleut language most closely related to Central Yup'ik. The Kodiak dialect of Alutiiq is highly threatened, with only 37 identified speakers, the youngest of whom is 56. In order to satisfy the community's desire to maintain the language, a conscious effort is now required. Through other funds, the Alutiiq Museum is pursuing a Master/Apprentice program, in which a speaker and a learner spend time together, conversing only in the traditional language. The present program will supplement those efforts by making the language accessible in other settings.
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• Tiemu'er Yuger Cultural Research Office

  Eastern Yugur-Chinese Bilingual Dictionary and Cultural Materials Project
  
  Tiemu'er is a native speaker of Eastern Yugur, a Mongolic language spoken by about 3,000 to 5,000 people in western China. His goal is to collect as much ethnographic and linguistic material as possible during the coming year. Since the language is still used in a variety of contexts, he will collect such categories as personal narratives, oral histories, folklore, descriptions of cultural activities, and songs. Although these texts will provide the backbone for a dictionary project, they will not be sufficient. Direct work on lexical elicitation and checking will also be undertaken. The dictionary will be a bilingual one, since most Eastern Yugur speakers are also fluent in Mandarin. This will open up these texts for ethnic Yugurs who have not yet learned the language.
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• Ardis Eschenberg Nebraska Indian Community College

  A Teaching Grammar of Umoⁿhoⁿ
  
  Umoⁿh^on (Omaha), spoken in Nebraska, has received some attention from linguists over the years, but very little of that attention has been fully published. A forthcoming grammatical sketch will provide some documentation but does not serve the needs of the community's language revitalization program. As Umoⁿh^on is severely endangered, the task of creating such a text is urgent. Classes in the language are offered at two branches of Nebraska Indian Community College and at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Eschenberg has served as the linguist and a language teacher for this effort and will coordinate the work on the grammar with as many elders as possible. Audio recordings will supplement what will be the first full description of the language; recordings have already been obtained for such topics as greetings, weather terms, and imperative formation. The present project will include video in new recordings, to make the material even more useful.
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• Andrew Cowell University of Colorado

  Early Arapaho Texts
  
  Some of the most valuable language material for current speakers was collected in the past by linguists and others, usually for their own purposes. Often, these materials contain prayers, songs and stories that are no longer completely known, if they survive at all. Having native speakers available to help with the retranscription, retranslation and reinterpretation is still vital. For Arapaho, the youngest fluent speakers are in their sixties, so now is an appropriate time to revisit some of the texts that were collected from the 1890s to the 1910s. The Arapaho community is interested in revitalizing their language and would like to see these texts in a more useable form. By tapping into the remaining specialized knowledge of the native speakers, Cowell will make these texts as useful as possible for future generations.
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• Maria Sheila B. Zamar University of Hawai'i at Manoa

  Ayta-Sorsogon Documentation Project: Saving an Endangered Language, Saving a Community
  
  Approximately 150 languages are spoken in the Philippines, most belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian group of the Austronesian family. Many of the minor languages are moribund, especially the Negrito group, with Ayto-Sorsogon at the top of the list. This language is spoken by about 40 people in a remote area of Prieto Diaz, Sorsogon. Rapid urbanization in this area has forced many of the people to give up their rural life. As often happens, they have improved their economic outlook but endangered their community and language. Zamar will gather data about the linguistic situation and raise awareness of the issues involved in language loss. She will construct a multi-lingual wordlist (Ayta-Sorsoganon- Filipino-English) arranged alphabetically and thematically. Recordings of traditional stories and songs will also be made.
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• Kirk Miller University of California, Santa Barbara

  Documenting Hadza, an Endangered Language Isolate of Tanzania
  
  Hadza is an isolate, that is, a language that is not obviously related to any nearby (or even not so nearby) languages. It is spoken by several hundred of the thousand or so Hadzabe, the last functioning hunter-gatherers in Africa. It is spoken in two minority communities, one on either side of the intermittent salt lake Eyasi in central Tanzania. While it is not known whether the two have different dialects, it is only known in one that the language is still being learned by children. Miller plans an eight-month trip to establish a working relationship with the Hadza community and Tanzanian officials, to become conversant with the Hadza language (apparently the first linguist who will do so), and to collect and gloss conversational texts. He will record and transcribe narratives and spontaneous conversation from a range of adults and children in a range of settings. Very little work has been done on acquisition of languages with extensive click systems, so access to the children will be of great intellectual value. The community has expressed interest in having primary education in their own language; having a full description of the language is an important step for making that happen. If relearning the language later becomes necessary, it will be of great importance to have texts of all types available, especially those that involve everyday communication (which is often lacking in traditional anthropological and linguistic work).
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• Rosemary G. Beam de Azcona Univeristy of California, Berkeley

  Continued Emergency Documentation of San Agust’n Mixtepec and Coatlan Loxicha Zapotec
  
  This award continues one given in 2003 to work on a language with only two elderly speakers remaining. One of these speakers of San Agust’n Mixtepec passed away this year, making the work that much more urgent. The work done in the previous year could only begin to scratch the surface, so further funding was necessary. Beam de Azcona will spend further time with the remaining speaker, expanding a dictionary from its current base of 300 words. The Coatlan Loxicha dictionary currently totals 4762 words, with many more to come. Texts have also been recorded, and a grammar based on this material will form the basis of Beam de Azcona's dissertation. She hopes to be able to do ethnobotanical fieldwork as well. Some of the results can be seen at: http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~rosemary/samz.htm
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• Zvjezdana Vrzic New York University

  Text Collection and Digital Archiving of Istro-Romanian
  
  Istro-Romanian is a severely endangered language spoken on the peninsula of Istria in northwest Croatia. The majority of the 200 or so speakers are middle-aged and elderly; many use the language only sporadically, and few children are learning it. Many of the remaining speakers have emigrated outside Croatia. In this project, a large collection of texts from the 1930s will be digitized, and new texts will be collected from speakers currently living in New York City. The printed texts will be challenging since they are not translated, but they are an irreplaceable resource. The new texts will be collected on whatever stories or conversations can be obtained. All these materials will be made available to the Istro-Romanian Cultural Center in Zhejane, Croatia.
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• Ibrahima Ouattara University of Ougadougou

  Save the Tiefo Language
  
  The last remaining village where Tiefo is spoken is Daramandougou in western Burkina Faso. Present plans entail moving all residents due to a mining project, which will scatter the speakers throughout the country. This will probably result in the language truly being lost; indeed, it has sometimes been proclaimed extinct already by linguists who could not find current speakers. Ouattara, a partial speaker of Tiefo, will document the language as well as possible before the relocation efforts begin. This will include a start on a language survey, collections of texts, and a more public discussion of the fate of the language.
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• Ilse Lehiste and Karl Pajusalu Ohio State University and University of Tartu

  Livonian Prosody
  
  Livonian is one of the Baltic-Finnic languages, closely related to Estonian and Finnish. It was the first language the western crusaders came in contact with at the turn of the 12/13 centuries. The Livonians gave their name to the land called Livland in German and the Province of Livland in the Russian empire. There is a single elderly speaker remaining who learned Livonian as his first language; the exact number of Livonian-Latvian bilinguals is not known, but it is unlikely to exceed a dozen or two. The present project examines the prosody of Livonian, which differs from other Finno-Ugric languages by including contrastive tone; it is assumed that Livonian has become a tone language due to contact with the tonal (but completely unrelated) Latvian. The study concentrates on a comparison of the realization of tones in the Livonian-Latvian bilinguals' two languages with that of the surrounding Latvian. The methodology involves recording and analysis of specially prepared test materials, similar to those used successfully in a study of Erzya, another related language. With this, it may be possible to recover a bit of the unique history of this Baltic area.
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• Cora McKenna and Brenda McKenna Nambé Pueblo, NM

  Tewa Dictionary and Curriculum, Nambé Dialect
  
  Nambé Pueblo is located 16 miles north of Santa Fe, at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Established in the 1300s, the present village of Nambé has a population of about 650 but only 43 fluent speakers. This distinct language of the Kiowa-Tanoan family is a precious resource for the community. The current Nambé classes serve learners from age 4 to 60, so the curriculum has to be specially designed. The only dictionary available is one from a neighboring pueblo, San Juan. The language is the same between the two pueblos, but the dialects are different. Copies of the dictionary are limited and out-of-print. The Endangered Language Fund grant awarded to the McKennas will help collect material for the classroom and begin a more comprehensive dictionary for Nambé's members while there is still time.
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• Lisa Conathan and Belle Anne Matheson UC Berkeley

  Arapaho Description and Reviatlization
  
  The Northern Arapaho language is spoken by about 1,000 people, most in their 50s or older. It has been over 40 years since children have learned Arapaho in the home. The Wind River Reservation in Wyoming has made significant efforts in bilingual education over the last decade, with mixed results. The immersion kindergarten has been a success but not to the point of producing fluent speakers. The community feels a need for a dictionary, but not a print one, rather, an audio one. The complicated shifts in the pitch accent are not necessary for fluent speakers to write but are difficult for learners to figure out. Conathan and Matheson will work on this dictionary along with a better description of the rules of the sound system, which will help with the teaching efforts.
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• Nadezhda Shalamova, Andrei Filtchenko, and Olga Potanina Tomsk Polytechnic U.; Rice U.; Tomsk State Pedagogical U.

  Documentation of Vasyugan Khanty
  
  This project pursues the documentation of the endangered language and cultural heritage of the Vasyugan Khanty, one of the Eastern Khanty group. Only about 50 speakers of this language remain, with most over 50 years of age. Being in an isolated location far from population centers in Tomsk, this language and its culture have received less attention than other, related languages. This project will redress the balance somewhat, providing texts and descriptions for the community and for linguistic science. Since Vayugan Khanty is quite conservative (probably because of its relative isolation), it provides a valuable source of data for reconstruction of the Khanty family.
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• Dmitri Funk Russian Academy of Sciences

  The Last Epic Singer in Shors (Western Siberia)
  
  The aim of this project is tape-recording the unique examples of the heroic epics of Shors, which are perfomed by the last practicing epic singer, Vladimir Tannagashev (born in 1932). It was story-tellers who for a long time managed to preserve all nuances of the spoken Shors language. Only three are now alive, and Tannagashev is the only one still practicing. He still remembers more than 60 epic songs, each of which can last an entire night. Unfortunately, with the rapid reduction in the audience, he does not perform that often. Funk is trying to take this last opportunity to record as many of the songs as possible, so that future generations can appreciate some of what they have missed.
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• Arthur Schmidt, Rita Flamand and Grace Zoldy Metis

  The Camperville Michif Master-Apprentice Program
  
  Michif is a mixed language that evolved from contact between Cree and French speakers in the early part of the European spread into the Americas. There are about 1,000 speakers, most elderly. Schmidt, a native Michif but not a speaker, will apprentice himself to Flamand and Zoldy. Both these speakers are eager to see young people learn the language. Flamand writes, "I think this program sounds like a Godsend to our dying language of heritage; the one on one immersion approach is the key, I hope, to accomplish the revitalizing of my language through these young apprentices." The Endangered Language Fund grant will allow Schmidt to spend time in Camperville, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipegosis in Manitoba, Canada. Here, the language is an active part of many people's lives. Mayor Donald Richard says, "We welcome this form of initiative to revitalize our heritage language, and are certain that it will be a positive impact to our community."
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• Cheruiyot Kiplangat Centre for Endangered Languages, Kenya

  Working to Save Ogiek and Sengwer of Kenya
  
  The minority languages of Kenya are under severe pressure from the influx of outsiders into traditional regions. The present project works with two languages of the Rift Valley, Ogiek and Sengwer. Language material will be recorded and made available to all interested in it. Information from elders on historical practices, values, beliefs, cultural festivities, herbal medicine and its use will be the most valuable. This will mainly benefit the young generations who have had their knowledge eroded, to assist future learners who are interested in indigenous people, and for the protection of the Ogiek and Sengwer minorities.
  Sengwer is a community that speaks Sengwer language, practice Sengwer culture and traditions. Severally, they were referred to as Cherengany or Mei. This nicknames meant poor person without cattle according to the Maasai Community. Sengwer Community are hunters and gatherers, who rely on honey, wild fruits and meat besides herbal medicines. Their population was claimed to be up to 50,000 in the 20th century, but it has descended to below 6,000 persons. The overall population of Ogiek is below 20,000 of which, 75% live in Mau Complex of Nakuru District. The Akie language is on the verge of deterioration after the only ancestral land for this community was invaded and demarcated by other communities including the Kipsigis, Tugen and Nandi. Daily trading has also caused the gradual loss of culture and language. For both communities, the way of fighting and facing these challenges is through the building of cultural centers in the villages so as to restore their rich heritage.
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• Claire Bowern Harvard U.

  Bardi Language Documentation: The Laves Material
  
  Bardi is a an Australian language, and member of the Nyulnyulan family. There are about 35 fully fluent speakers of the language along with up to 200 passive speakers (out of a community of 1200). All the fluent speakers are over 60 years of age, most over 70. The community, feeling an increasing need to record the language, advertised for a linguist to help in the 1990s. Collection continued until 1994, and some of the results have appeared (such as a dictionary in 1999). But there is a considerable amount of material that has been collected that is not accessible to community members. Of particular value are the cultural texts collected by Gerhardt Laves in 1929. These were written in a way that is relatively easy to decipher if you know the language, but very difficult if you do not. Bowern will check as many of these stories with the remaining fluent speakers as possible. The Bardi community is eager to have these stories available, and they need to be reworked now while there are still people who know the cultural context of the materials.
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• Francis Egbokhare U. Ibadan, Nigeria

  Documenting Akuku Oral Traditions
  
  Akuku is an endangered language spoken in the Edo state of Nigeria. The village of Akuku is set in a hilly and rocky terrain, one difficult for travel. It is a single-village community, with no claims to affinity with neighboring or distant villages, and none of its neighbors claim any kinship with it. It is claimed to be the oldest community in the area, and it is believed to have evolved the art of building hanging bridges across tree tops. The language is now under pressure from the national languages (Pidgin English, English and Yoruba), despite its distance from the cities. Egbokhare will record oral narratives and translate them so that both the younger generation and linguists can better understand them. A wordlist will also be generated, to allow a better placement of the language within the Edoid family.
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• Rosemary Beam de Azcona UC Berkeley

  Southern Zapotec Language Materials
  
  It appears that there are only two remaining speakers of San Agust’n Mixtepec Zapotec, a southern Zapotec language of Mexico. Coatlán-Loxicha Zapotec is better off with about 170 speakers, but its decline is evident as well. Beam de Azcona will use her experience with several of the Zapotec languages to record as much of these materials as possible. She reports, "As a volunteer for the Breath of Life: Silent No More language revitalization workshop at UC Berkeley, I witnessed first hand the value linguistic records have for people trying to learn about their ancestral languages." She plans to provide as many texts as possible for the appreciation of future generations.
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• Rick Thoman and Gary Holton U Alaska Fairbanks

  The Tanacross Athabascan Sound System
  
  This project will produce a platform-independent interactive CD-ROM illustrating the sound system of Tanacross Athabascan. This will be accomplished by videotaping native speakers pronouncing selected words and phrases. The sound system of Tanacross contains a rich array of ejectives, affricates and fricatives as well as contrastive tone. This CD-ROM will be a useful resource for Tanacross language learners and serve to document the rich segmental and tonal inventory of this endangered Athabascan language.
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• Valerio Luciani Ascencio Kawki language project

  Preservation of the Kawki language
  
  Luciani is the youngest fluent speaker of Kawki, one of three extant Jaqi languages. You find its village of Cachuy 250 kilometers from Lima, Peru, 25 kms of horse trail at the end (going to 3100 meters above sea level). There is no mail or telephone service. Luciani spoke Kawki until he went to school, where he was forced to switch to Spanish. "This seemed very strange to me and I felt very sad because I did not use my own language. Thus, little by little, I was forgetting it, and I liked Spanish," Luciani writes. Today, he is teaching about 40 children in Cachuy. His ELF grant will purchase supplies and printing for the materials that he uses in these classes. The material will help, but the largest contribution will continue to come form Luciani's own efforts.
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• Maximilian Viatori U. California, Davis

  A practical Zapara phonology and morphology
  
  Zapara is spoken in the rainforest province of Pastaza in eastern Ecuador. There are currently three fluent speakers of Zapara and several others who remember songs and words, but cannot converse in the language. Of these speakers, the youngest if 65 year old and the oldest is 95. As a member of the small Zaparoan language family, Zapara shares few features with other Amazonian languages. Viatori's work on the phonology and morphology of the language will help determine whether any further relationships can be reliably claimed. It will also help provide materials for the reintroduction of Zapara into the curriculum of schools in five communities.
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• Thomas McIlwraith, Regina Louie, Angela Dennis and Sally Havard Iskut First Nations

  Talking to the animals: Tahltan-language animal stories and forms of address
  
  Tahltan is a critically endangered Athapaskan language spoken by fewer than one hundred adults in British Columbia. These communities lack a significant grammar and have very few texts recorded in the Tahltan language. The texts that will be collected in this project will serve linguistic, ethnolinguistic and pedagogical goals. The phrases and stories that are recorded will be made available to school children and community members alike through the distribution of the resulting CD-ROM. This will support the existing efforts in the schools and bring more awareness to the community at large. The project also satisfies community interest in preserving Iskut stories and the voices of elders telling those stories.
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• Rosalind Williams Splatsin Tribe

  Creation of Secwepenc Wordlist 2002
  
  The Splatsin are one of the seventeen tribes that make up the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation in British Columbia. There are sixteen remaining speakers fluent in the eastern dialect of this Salishan language, and there are four nearly fluent learners of the language (including Williams) who have been mentored by the elders. In reviewing the word lists and workbook for use in the classroom, the words were found to have been documented for a single meaning or situation. For instance in the wordlist book, the word for "frost" is simply listed: tsk'waylecw, tsk'way. The fluent speakers expanded this as tsk'waylecw: front on the grass; tsk'way: light frost on the branches; and su7lecw: frost on the dirt. Williams will help fill in these gaps and will record the fluent speakers saying the words as well.
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• Naomi Nagy U. New Hampshire

  Preserving Faetar in the school
  
  Faetar is a language spoken in two small, mountaintop villages in southern Italy: Faeto and Celle St. Vito. It is a variant of the Francoprovenal language that was spoken in a small part of France between Lyon and the Alps before the codification of French across France. Because of a small migration from eastern France to southern Italy about 600 years ago, Francoprovenal survives as Faetar. The population of the villages, however, has dropped drastically in the 20th century, as with most farming villages in Italy. While the population is small, loyalty to the language is strong, even among those who use Italian in school. Nagy will help develop an orthography to allow Faetar to gain a foothold in the schools and help keep it alive within the community.
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• Chris Beier and Lev Michael U. Texas, Austin

  Iquito language documentation project
  
  The last remaining Iquito community is San Antonio in the Amazon Basin of Peru. Recently, the community has developed a serious interest in starting a language revitalization project. They felt the need to have outside assistance for material resources and linguistic expertise. In cooperation with Cabeceras, a US-based group dedicated to providing resources to indigenous Amazonian communities in defending their health, well-being, and autonomy, Beier and Michael have devised a revitalization program. The first step has been a reaction against the centuries-old efforts to eradicate the language and culture. Only in the past five years has the political scene changed enough to allow this pride in Iquito to emerge. The next steps will be the simultaneous documentation of the language and training of the speakers themselves as linguists. This training will allow work to continue at a scale not possible for outsiders, but with the help that linguistic science can bring to language description and curriculum development.
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• Gessiane Lobato Picanco U. British Columbia

  Documentation of Kuruaya, a moribund language of Brazil
  
  Kuruaya, a language of the Munduruku family of Tupi stock, is among those increasing the statistics of Brazilian languages that are nearly extinct. Only five elderly speakers remain, and they no longer use Kuruaya in their daily lives. Since the description of the language is so sketchy, basic work with word lists, texts and paradigms will be undertaken first. Recordings will be made in video as well as audio, helping to locate the language in place and time. The interviews will be individual, but an eventual reunion of all speakers has been planned. Copies of all material will be made available to the Kuruaya people , local institutions and other collaborators.
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• Nikolai Vakhtin European U. at St. Petersburg

  Siberian Yupik Eskimo conversation book
  
  When Yupik Eskimo was introduced into the Siberian school curriculum in the 1930s, all the children spoke it as their mother tongue and had only to learn how to write and read it. After 60 years of demographic, social and economic pressure, formal education, and residential schooling, the situation has changed drastically. Now, school-age children speaker almost only Russian and learn their ethnic language at school as a foreign language from teachers who themselves often do not know the language very well. The language situation is somewhat better on the U.S. side of the Bering Strait, where most children on St. Lawrence Island now speak the language. With the lifting of the Iron Curtain, it is now possible for Yupiks to visit their relatives on either side. Ironically, the only common language now is Yupik, even though the Russians speak it haltingly or only listen to it. This unexpected promotion of Yupic to the status of an international language contributes considerably to its prestige and has spurred the Siberian Yupiks to learn it better. Vakhtin proposes to take material from his 30 years of work on the language to make booklets for those who are traveling to the U.S. and are now in need of a "Berlitz" for Yupik.
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• Pamela Bunte and Nikole Lobb California State U., Long Beach

  Using San Juan Southern Paiute narratives in a language revitalization program
  
  The San Juan Paiute tribe, the easternmonst of ten Southern Paiute tribes, is located in Arizona and Utah on the Navajo reservation. When they received Federal recognition in 1990, they were unique in being the only Southern Paiute tribe still making everyday use of the language and having children still able to speak. Now, about 30 of the 300 tribal members are fluent speakers, but only one child (a four-year-old) is learning it. Feeling this loss, the tribe has responded by setting up a language revitalization program that will include short immersion camps. Southern Paiute traditional narratives are culturally important as they express Paiute world view and traditional lifeways. In addition, stories of all kinds are told in everyday life, becoming one of the primary ways that children were socialized to be proper members of the Paiute community. Bunte plans to record on videotape both the telling of some of these stories and some dramatizations using puppets, both for use in the immersion camps. The tapes and the English translations will provide a lasting legacy for the Paiute community.
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• Connie Dickinson U. Oregon

  Tsafiki dictionary project
  
  Tsafiki (Colorado) is spoken by about 2000 Tsachila living on seven communes situated at the western base of the Andes near the city of Santo Domingo de los Colorados in Ecuador. While the language is not in imminent danger and children are still learning it, the Tsachila are under tremendous pressure from the dominant Spanish culture, and their way of life is undergoing rapid change. The completion of a highway into their territory in 1958 brought new settlers, whose city now divides the traditional Tsachila group from each other. Schools now have Spanish monolinguals, so the shift away from Tsafiki is underway. Work on a dictionary has begun with the help of PIKITSA, an indigenous institution dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the Tsachila (Colorados) language and culture. Dickinson first began working on Tsafiki in 1994 and has visited every year since. The material she has collected will allow for rapid progress on the dictionary, in conjunction with the native speakers at PIKITSA. The communities are looking forward to having a dictionary to use in their fight to maintain their language.
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• Doug Marmion Australian National U.

  Wutung language maintenance and literacy development
  
  Wutung is a small coastl village in the far north-west of Papua New Guinea, lying immediately adjacent to the border with Indonesia. Sandaun Province is an area of great linguistic diversity, being home to approximately 110 languages in eiht genetically distinct families, along with three isolates. Of these languages, none has yet been described in detail, although there are partial descriptions of perhaps half a dozen. Wutung is a member of the Sko Phylum of languages, none of which has yet been described in detail, and most of which are known only from wordlists. All Wutung children are learning Wutung, but they also learn the national language, Tok Pisin. This is a fragile situation that could easily tip the way of losing the language altogether. There currently exist no literature or dictionary. Marmion will collect as many texts as feasible, including those that deal with traditional culture, which is also threatened. The materials will be translated and information entered into the lexical database and used to facilitate the description of the language. Texts will be selected to be made into books to be printed in Australia and sent back for use in the school and by the general community.
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• Susan Doty Creek Tribe

  Muskogee Creek language traditional song preservation
  
  The songs used in Creek Indian churches are part of a strong tradition, since at least the removal from the Southeast to Oklahoma. However, with the encroachment of English on the Creek speaking population, the songbooks are getting smaller and smaller. The more complicated, meaningful songs are being lost to simpler, repetitive tunes that are easier to learn. As churches disappear and become more isolated, it is more important to share the knowledge and preserve it. Doty will use her ELF grant to visit as many churches in Oklahoma as possible, recording songs in a clear, strong voice so that the words are easier to learn. Doty plans to make the songs available in as many media as possible.
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• Justin T. Neely Citizen Potawatomi Nation

  Potawatomi Language Preservation and Apprenticeship Program
  
  The Citizen Potawatomi Nation is centered at a reservation in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Neely will apprentice himself to two elders fluent in the language. These master-apprentice programs have been among the most successful for continuing a language tradition when the youngest generation has not learned the language from childhood. Eventually, his efforts will be recorded and used as a basis for language instruction material. It is hoped that this work will strengthen the bonds that exists between the six bands of Potawatomi and lead to further collaboration on language preservation.
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• Mary D. Stewart St?:lo Nation

  Preservation and Revitalization of the Upriver Halq?em?ylem Dialect Language within the Family Entity
  
  Upriver Halq’eméylem (Halkomelem) is a Salishan language of the Central Coast branch. Only five elders still fluently speak the language. The present project will bring together words and phrases into interactive language resources that will be designed to bring young children (birth to age 6) into contact with the language through the entirety of the family unit. Materials will be collected in five subject areas: clothing (with seasonal variants), dinner table, daily events, labeled areas of the classroom, and greetings. Audio tapes will be created for each theme, and there will be instruction booklets geared toward children and parents.
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• Angela M. Nonaka UCLA

  Saving Signs from Bhan Khor: Documentation and Preservation of an Indigenous Sign Language in Thailand
  
  Although the typical language is spoken, sign languages make use of the same language ability and share many of the same complexities. The social circumstances that allow a sign language to flourish are relatively rare, and sign languages have likely come and gone with regularity in human history. The similarities and differences between spoken and signed languages, and the progress of their endangerment, are relatively unexplored in linguistic science. The present proposal will study the Ban Khor Sign Language, which is used by about 1,000 people in remote areas of northeastern Thailand. It was developed from Thai Sign Language about 60-80 years ago. A basic grammar and lexicon (recorded in video format) will make further assessment of the language and its endangerment possible.
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• Mildred Quaempts Claremont and San Diego State

  Umatilla Immersion Camp
  
  Umatilla is one of the three languages spoken by the confederated tribes (Cayuse and Walla Walla are the others), and they are spoken fluently by fewer than 60 people. Quaempts is one of the fluent second-language learners of Umatilla, and she will conduct an immersion program for sixteen tribal members of various ages. Several elders will be available for a five-day, intensive language experience. Much of the interaction will be recorded, and some of that will be used to help create new language teaching materials. This first immersion program will help give guidance to future versions.
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• Paula L. Meyer University of Victoria

  Baha California Tiipay Comparative Dictionary
  
  Baja California Tiipay is a Yuman language closely related to U. S. versions of Tiipay (also called Diegue–o) but still considered by its speakers to be a separate language. There has so far been no extensive description or dictionary work. Only a handful of elderly people still speak the language, as the parents have been convinced that knowing the language is detrimental to success in modern society. The present project will therefore focus on a dictionary, to retain the last vestiges of a language that is bound for extinction. When possible, two consultants will be used at once, which often allows for a better flow of information about different words. While the language is not being revived at present, a successful dictionary will be an invaluable resource if the descendants ever decide to try to revive the language.
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• Marina Dmitrievna Lublinskaya St. Petersburg University

  Collection of Audio Material in the Nganasan Language
  
  Nganasan (along with Nenets and Enets) belongs to the Northern Samoyedic group of Uralic languages. Although the size of the speaking population seems never to have exceeded about 1,500, at present only about 50% of the population (and 15% of the children) speak the language, indicating that the language is on the decline. There are at present no audio recordings, and time is running short to record the truly fluent speakers. Lublinskaya will record words, phrases, texts and folklore for transfer to CDs which can be distributed to the community. Although there are written materials in the language, the culture is still largely oral, so this method of presenting the material will be the most appropriate. The 4,000 word dictionary already created will be supplemented with pronunciations, increasing its usefulness greatly.
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• Kristine Stenzel University of Colorado

  The Wanano Project
  
  The speakers of Wanano hope that the bilingual education that is guaranteed by the 1988 Brazilian constitution will someday become a reality. To help make that possible, Stenzel will help produce written material for this Tucano language. She will also record conversational data to help understand the complex situation of life with many languages that is so typical of Brazil. These languages have many unusual linguistic features, such as the simultaneous interaction of two noun categorization systems, the coding of up to five evidential categories (see Waltz, Nathan, and Carolyn Waltz, El agua, la roca y el humo : estudios sobre la cultura wanana del Vaupes. Santafe de Bogota, D.C., Colombia : Instituto Linguistico de Verano, 1997), and a possibly unique tonal system.
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• Kenny Holbrook Capitola, CA

  Instruction in Northeastern Maidu
  
  Only a few speakers of Maidu survive, and one of the best hopes of continuing the language is for young language learners to apprentice themselves to those speakers in order to gain a sufficient degree of fluency that they can keep it going. The main teacher in this case will be somewhat unusual, in that he is not a native speaker. But William Shipley, emeritus from UC Santa Cruz, learned Maidu from HolbrookÕs grandmother over fifty years ago. He has done substantial work on it since, and is now poised to pass on that knowledge to a descendant who was not able to learn the language as a child. All of this will make the substantial corpus of written material more useful and accessible for future generations.
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• Zarifa Nazarova Tajik Academy of Sciences

  The Vocabulary of the Traditional Culture of the Ishkashim Language
  
  The layer of language that deals with the spiritual life of a people is of interest to linguists, ethnologists, art historians and members of the heritage community. The present project will collect as many lexical entries in the cultural domain as possible. Tracing the influence of the various languages of contact (other Pamirian languages and various Tajik languages) will be explored even as the cultural significance is recorded as extensively as possible. The cultural heritageÑand the paths of cultural evolutionÐwill be available permanently thanks to this effort.
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• Joyce Twins Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma

  Cheyenne Pedagogical Materials
  
  Cheyenne is an Algonquian language spoken in western Oklahoma and Montana. At this time, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes have undertaken an ambitious language program that uses telecoursing to put the Cheyenne language into four area high schools in western Oklahoma. However, there is a severe lack of teaching materials at all levels. A single teacher is charged with the responsibility of developing all material for the current courses. The present project will help alleviate this problem, especially in the use of sound recordings of fluent speakers to give life to the written materials that predominate now. Marcia Haag (U. of Oklahoma) and Laura Gibbs (Talking Leaves consortium) will lend their expertise to this project as well. Creating this material while there are still native speakers with us is of the utmost importance. While many tribes are recreating their languages from historical records, those still blessed with native speakers can create a much more usable curriculum with modern technology, which lets us preserve the sounds of language in addition to writing it down.
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• Alice J. Anderton Intertribal Wordpath Society

  Ponca Culture in Our Own Words
  
  The Ponca language belongs to the Siouan linguistic family, which includes Dakota and Lakhota. It is spoken in the White Eagle tribal community, just south of Ponca City, in northern Oklahoma. Only about thirty fluent speakers remain, all in their 60s or older. The Ponca Language Arts Council (PLAC) has received repeated comments by Ponca students and teachers that they lack good materials for teaching the Ponca language, and that the traditional culture is being lost; the Intertribal Wordpath Society (IWS) has been granted an award to help improve this situation. IWS was founded in 1996 to promote the teaching, awareness, use, and status of Oklahoma Indian languages. As part of its mission to educate the public about native languages and assist in their preservation, IWS will produce five videotaped texts describing Ponca culture in the Ponca language. These video projects will be aired on its television show Wordpath, a public access cable program it produces on Cox Cable about Oklahoma Indian languages and those who preserve them. Researcher Alice Anderton will tape the texts in the Ponca/White Eagle area. Each VHS tape will be two hours long and contain 10-15 minutes of text in Ponca only, Ponca text with English subtitles, and Ponca text with Ponca subtitles. A translator, in consultation with the native speakers, will then produce a transcription and a literal and fluent translation. These will be in the form of five booklets to be distributed with the tapes. IWS will provide copies of the tapes to PLAC, Frontier High School, and the Ponca City Public Library. The research will provide samples of fully fluent conversational texts, a rarity for almost any Native American language, and make them available to students of Ponca and to the linguistic community for study. The tapes will document Ponca culture, teach and popularize the new official Ponca alphabet, and educate the general public about Ponca language and culture.
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• Mark J. Awakuni-Swetland University of Nebraska

  ELF Omaha Language Curriculum Development Project
  
  Omaha is one of five languages in the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan language family. In 1994, the Omaha Tribe stated that less than 1% of its total enrollment were identified as fluent speakers of Omaha. It is reported that less than seventy elderly speakers of the language remain and that of these, only thirty use the language on a daily basis in the Macy area of Nebraska. There are several facilities that teach Omaha, namely the Macy Public school (recently renamed Omaha Nation Public School) and Nebraska Indian Community College. However, all suffer from the lack of a systematic curriculum, associated classroom materials, and native speakers trained in language instruction. NICC wishes to develop a more rigorous language curriculum, so as to provide their Omaha students with greater ability to transfer credits to other post-secondary institutions. The ELF Omaha Language Curriculum Development Project is a component of a larger collaborative effort to combat this problem. It proposes to support the development of language and culture lesson plans, craft culturally relevant immersion situations, and to produce language exercises, games, drills, and language lab audio tapes. The project will draw upon existing curriculum materials from NICC and Omaha Nation. Such materials will be collected and examined for linguistic and cultural content, placed into a larger four semester framework, and edited for content and consistency. New lessons will be generated to link existing lessons, as well as expand into new linguistic and sociocultural domains. Funds permitting, language lab tapes will be produced. The materials will be created with the assistance of Omaha native speakers residing in Macy, Lincoln, and Omaha, Nebraska. NICC and Omaha Nation will support the project by identifying and encouraging native speaker participants, publicizing the project within the Omaha community, providing office space for curriculum development work with the local speakers, contributing copies of current curriculum materials from their respective institutions, and assisting in the evaluation of such materials. Funds will be shared equally with the NICC and Omaha Nation, so as to bring direct benefit to the larger Omaha community at the K-12 and post-secondary levels.
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• Melissa Axelrod, Jule Gomez de Garcia, and Jordan Lachler University of New Mexico

  Plains Apache Language Documentation
  
  The Plains Apaches, formally known as the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, are centered in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Plains Apache is one of the Apachean group of Athabaskan languages, and is part of the Na Dene family.
  Today, there are only three elderly people who still speak the Plains Apache language. As a non-reservationist community, the Plains Apache are surrounded by English and other non-Apachean languages as diverse as Kiowa, Wichita, and Delaware. Children attend public school rather than an Apache Indian school, and do not speak the native language. It has been reported, however, that although no children speak the language, a few seem to understand it.
  Tribal leaders and elders formed a committee in 1993 to help preserve the Plains Apache Tribe's cultural and linguistic heritage. The primary aim of the project was to produce documentation of the language, chiefly in the form of an interactive CD ROM dictionary. Axelrod, Garc’a, and Lachler will act as consultants in completing the dictionary. In addition, they will continue research to aid the Plains Apache in language documentation. Their project will include a dictionary, a grammar, the videotaping of elders, and the publication of oral history and folklore. However, timing is urgent. Since their last visit, two of the most fluent Plains Apache speakers have passed away.
  The research team will continue collecting data, primarily ancestor stories and oral history, from Mr. Chalepah Sr., a Plains Apache speaker with whom they have previously worked. They will conduct video and audio recordings. The team also hopes to locate the other known fluent speaker and to search for other speakers and rememberers of the language. They will work with the community to transcribe and analyze the stories they have gathered. These materials will be formatted for community use.
  The research, aside from offering great benefits to the Plains Apache community, will also permit comparative research on Apachean languages and on the Na Dene family in general.
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• Frank Bechter and Stephen Hibbard University of Chicago

  Apsaalooke Textual And Gestural Form: Videorecording Crow and Plains Sign Talk Narratives
  
  The Crow language is spoken by roughly four-thousand people in southeastern Montana (about half the registered Crow population), while only 10% of the Crow children are acquiring the language today. Traditionally, most Crow speakers would also be fluent in "Plains Sign Talk" (PST). PST is a manual semiotic code that was once a lingua franca in widespread use among the Crow and other Plains Indian nations. This communicative system, however, is clearly moribund, with probably fewer than 100 proficient speakers, all elderly. We now have one last chance to see how conventions in PST may have affected storytelling ad other techniques in spoken Crow.
  Bechter and Hibbard will spend one week in Pryor, MT on the Crow Reservation collecting traditional and non-traditional narratives in Crow and PST. These narratives will be recorded in font of Crow-speaking audiences. The researchers expect to document gestural forms (if not PST forms) in informal discourse as well. Crow consultants will aid in producing Crow transcriptions and English translations of narratives. The resulting materials will consist of audiovisual data, Crow transcription, and English transcription interposed on separate digital tracks.
  The project will yield a high-quality, composite audio-visual and textual archive of Crow and PST narrative data. This will not only benefit researchers, but will aid in language preservation and revitalization projects. One copy of the archive will be donated to the Crow Agency Bilingual Education Program. Another copy will be available for researchers through the Language Archives at the University of Chicago.
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• Barry F. Carlson and Suzanne Cook University of Victoria

  Lacandon Text Collection
  
  Lacandon iscurrently spoken by a dwindling population of Mayas. Their ancestry has been obscured by the absence of a written tradition, and their primary source of culture, the Lacandon story-teller, has been threatened by the influence of multimedia technology such as television. As technology advances and the remaining story-tellers grow older and fewer, the state of the Lacandon traditional culture, rich with pre-Columbian verbal art, is in increasing jeopardy.
  Given the imminent extinction of the Lacandon culture in Middle America, work needs to be done to document the oral performances, for the sake of their preservation and for future linguistic analyses. Carlson and Cook will record traditional narratives, songs, and ceremonies performed by the Lacandon story-tellers and religious practitioners in the northern community of Naja in Mexico. Personal narratives and conversations will also be recorded in order to document the full range of Lacandon discourse genres.
  The collection of audio and video recordings of oral performances will serve a variety of purposes. Primarily, it preserves the Lacandon oral culture against further loss, but also will provide materials for possible future language renewal projects. The research will augment earlier grammatical information, while adding the new dimension of audio/video analysis of oral performance previously unstudied by linguists. In addition, the oral performances may be compiled into a collection of Lacandon texts. These performances will add to the growing body of research on Native American ethnopoetics.
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• G. Tucker Childs and M Djibril Batchily Portland State University

  Fieldwork on Mmani (Atlantic, Niger-Congo), a dying language of coastal Guinea-Conakry
  
  Mmani is the northernmost language of the Bullom family of the Mel sub-group of languages, belonging to the Atlantic Group Niger-Congo. Its speakers are located on the southernmost coast of Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. Investigation has revealed that there are several villages of speakers on the islands off the coast, as well, one of which is now accessible by ferry.
  Mmani is geographically swamped and surrounded by Susu (a distantly related language) and interpenetrated with Temne (a genetically related language in the Mel sub-group). It has been reported that there are very few speakers left, at most a few hundred, and there are no speakers under 60 years old.
  Childs suspects that Mmani is not a dialect of Bullom, as it has been recently regarded. Instead, he believes that Mmani is at least a widely divergent dialect, if not a separate language. Currently there is no work being done on the language, and previous research has yielded little documentation and no sound recordings.
  Childs and Batchily plan to document and describe the Mmani language to the extent possible given its current status and available time (two months). Research will include making recordings, digitizing the speech for archiving, accumulating a word list and examples of different discourse types, and writing/sketching a grammar. The investigation of Mmani will chronicle a once distinct language and culture, and it will contribute to a greater understanding of the Atlantic group of languages as a whole.
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• Terry Crowley University of Waikato

  Moribund languages of northern Malakula
  
  The island of Malakula, the second largest island in the Republic of Vanuatu in the southwestern Pacific, currently holds over two dozen separate Oceanic languages spoken by a population of under 30,000 in total. In spite of this linguistic diversity, however, the original number of languages is thought to have been much higher, possibly one third of them having become lost or moribund due to contact with European labor recruiters, traders, and missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  Crowley recently discovered that the Langalanga and Marakhus languages, previously assumed to be extinct, do in fact have a small number of speakers scattered through a number of villages. In addition, he was informed that a previously unreported language originally spoken in the Khabtol area of central Malakula also has a small number of speakers remaining. These languages are only spoken by older members of the community, who speak other local vernaculars as their primary languages; they are not being passed on to younger generations. This is our last chance to record them so that descendants may appreciate, in part, what has been lost.
  Crowley will survey the central and northern areas of Malakula in order to locate the remaining speakers of these three moribund languages, and to record as much linguistic data as possible from these speakers. He will use Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu, to complete his research. Data most likely will include lexical information, elicited sentence material to indicate structural outlines of the languages, and narrative textual data transcribed from tape recordings. The latter will not only complement the elicited structural material, but also allow for the recording of the oral tradition, which will be of particular interest and value to the communities involved. Since these languages are all completely undocumented, Crowley's data will also be of great value to linguistic typologists and to historical linguists.
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• Linda A. Cumberland Indiana University

  A Grammar of Assiniboine
  
  Cumberland plans to develop a descriptive grammar of Assiniboine, a Siouan language of the northern plains, now only spoken by a small number of elders in Saskatchewan and Montana. The grammar will focus on phonology, morphology, syntax, and usage, including gendered speech, register, and generational and regional variation. The goal of the project is to provide a broad description of the major grammatical processes of Assiniboine that will serve as a resource for the Assiniboine communities in Canada and the U.S. in their language revitalization programs. Also, the project will serve as a resource for future, more detailed formal linguistic analyses and comparisons to other Siouan languages.
  Taking a traditional anthropological linguistics approach, Cumberland will first construct a rudimentary outline of the grammar from previously gathered materials prior to entering the field. The following fieldwork will include daily one-on-one elicitation sessions over an initial period of three months. During this time a language committee of speakers will be chosen to serve as the major resource of material in the following nine months of study. This committee will meet to discuss separate cultural domains, each meeting recorded on audiotape. Significant portions of the meetings will be transcribed later in one-on-one sessions with committee members. The recordings will ultimately be archived with other Assinibione materials at the American Indian Studies Research Institute (AISRI). In addition, Cumberland and the committee will take "field trips" of varying lengths to sites of historical and cultural importance to the speakers, in hopes of eliciting dormant linguistic knowledge via immersion.
  Currently only one hundred and thirty Assiniboines are considered fluent speakers out of a total population of 3500, and most of these fluent speakers are over the age of seventy. There are at least three centers actively attempting to revitalize the language. However, no systematic description of the grammar exists.
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• Theodore Isham Mvskoke Language Institute

  Language Immersion Camps in Mvskoke (Creek)
  
  Immersion in a language environment is one of the most successful techniques in language learning. Isham, of the Mvskoke Language Institute in Oklahoma, used a grant from the ELF to start a program with current members of the Muscogee Nation. Workshops were held in the summer of 2000, involving language learners at all levels and ages. The current status of the Muscogee language is that approximately 11% of the population who live in Oklahoma fluently speak the language on a regular basis. Another 3% understand the language and speak it occasionally, while approximately 1% has knowledge of the language but are uncomfortable speaking due to unavailability of conversational partners. At present ther are approximately 48,000 citizens enrolled in the tribe, 28,000 of whom live in Oklahoma. Most of the fluent speakers are elderly, a feature common to many endangered languages. The immersion program used as many media as were available--audio recordings, videotapes, written material and cultural material. It is hoped that the immersion camps will create a better environment for the use of the language by a larger number of casual users, and eventually the acquisition of the language by young children. Further, videotapes of the older generation speaking in the heritage language will be treasured by their descendants for even more generations.
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• Linda Jordan University of Oklahoma

  Cherokee Storytelling Project
  
  The Cherokees comprise the largest Native American group in North America. It is estimated that there are between 10,000 and 15,000 native speakers of Cherokee, an Iroquoian language. The majority of these speakers reside in Oklahoma. Cherokee is not considered in imminent danger of extinction. It is a threatened language, however, as the majority of its speakers are elders. There is pressure on children who do possess the language to acquire primary fluency in English. Unless swift, comprehensive action is taken, the language will not survive the next century. A number of pedagogical materials have been generated within the Cherokee community, including children's books and classroom materials. There is also a rich linguistic literature and an excellent dictionary and grammar. However, there is a great need for sophisticated, text-based materials for both older children and adults who are striving to recover their language. Ideally, these texts will be grounded within the history and culture of the Cherokee community. Jordan will address this need through the recording of storytelling in Cherokee. The researchers plan to provide materials that incorporate recordings, a substantial text in both the Syllabary and Cherokee phonetics, an artful translation into English, word-by-word translation into English, close morphological analysis, minimal discourse analysis, and separate grammars specific to each story. The materials will be compiled with frequent consultation with the Cherokee community. Copies will be made of all materials for deposit in the Vaughan library of Northeastern State University, other public facilities in Eastern Oklahoma, and the offices of the Endangered Languages Fund at Yale University. The project will aid community members in learning the art of storytelling, which is an effective method of language preservation when community-based and culturally accurate. It will ensure detailed analysis is immediately available to any serious student of language; in particular, it will allow teachers easy, free access to more sophisticated materials for advanced students. Further, the research will provide large segments of speech entirely controlled by the speaker, which has not been collected previously, and will yield rich information about Cherokee syntax and phonology. The recordings and texts will be of particular use to scholars working on discourse analysis, as well as sociolinguists.
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• Eva Toulouze and Kaur Maegi Tartu University

  Recording and Analyzing Forest Nenets Language Materials
  
  The Forest Nenets are a semi-nomadic group of people inhabiting northern Russia. They have no written language and little linguistic description, and although clearly related to their more northern neighbors, the Tundra Nenets, their language differs enough to deny mutual understanding. Nor are the Forest Nenets recognized officially as a single ethnic group, as they live in two different administrative areas. In addition, the Forest Nenets' territory has been occupied since the late 1960s by the oil industry, which has damaged the natural and human environment of all the indigenous people. As a result, the language and culture is seriously threatened.
  Currently only a few elders have a rich knowledge of both everyday language and traditional oral folklore. The middle-aged population uses the native tongue as a means of everyday communication among themselves and with the elderly, but little is passed on to the younger generations.
  Since Forest Nenets is endangered in its physical as well as in its cultural existence, and since it is only marginally known in the academic community, Toulouze and MŠgi plan to concentrate on two goals: fieldwork collection of language materials and establishment of a scientifically justified transcription of Forest Nenets for use as a written language. The latter will be used in the community in hopes of stimulating more interest in the language and culture.
  Toulouze and MŠgi will record folklore, as well as spontaneous daily conversation, in two regions of Russia: the Agan and Num-to regions. The researchers will conduct fieldwork in both regions for two months, eliciting audio/video digital recordings which will ultimately be given to the National Museum of Estonia. After the systematization and analysis of the recorded material, Toulouze and MŠgi will prepare various materials with community leader Juri Vella for use by the Forest Nenets.
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• Elena Benedicto Purdue University

  Indigenous Women as Linguists
  
  The goal of this project is to form a team of Mayangna women in linguistic techniques, so that they can later use that knowledge in the bilingual programs of Nicaragua. The more immediate goal is to prepare the lexical entry cards for a secondary school dictionary and a kindergarten picture dictionary, for which photographic material has already been collected. This is an indigenous effort to provide educational materials which brings the generations together in a single project. An unusual aspect of these dictionaries is that they will be bidialectal (Tuahka and Panamahka).
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• Marianne Milligan University of Wisconsin, Madison

  Menominee Phonology and Morphology
  
  Only a few speakers of Menominee remain, and they show varying degrees of fluency. Although it is true that Leonard Bloomfield worked extensively on Menominee, it is still true that no one researcher (even Bloomfield) can fully describe a language. The 7,500 Menominee tribe has expressed interest in revitalizing their language, but there is a lack of materials and speakers to contribute to the effort. The present work on the phonology and morphology of Menominee will provide some of the material for a language curriculum. Many traditional stories told by elders are being videotaped as well.
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• Jonette Sam Pueblo of Picuris

  An Integrated Approach to Language Renewal at Picuris Pueblo, New Mexico
  
  This grant allowed four members of the Language Committee of the Pueblo of Picuris to attend the 6th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conferes in Tucson, AZ, this past June. The four members of the Pueblo were able to meet with others struggling with the issues of language revitalization. The discussions of such topics as language camps, language in sports and other community recreation, language at work, language in religion and culture, language and the media, and language in community historical and cultural research proved very valuable.
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• Carolyn J. MacKay and Frank R. Trechsel Ball State University

  A Linguistic Description of Pisa Flores Tepehua
  
  This variety of Tepehua, spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, is a member of the Totonacan language family, a group of linguistic isolates in Mesoamerica. About 1,000 of the 10,000 Tepehua speakers use the Pisa Flores dialect, but it is rapidly being displaced by the national language, Spanish. Only one dialect has been described in any detail, and the present work will begin that task with Pisa Flores. The texts and elicited words will be used for a dictionary, grammatical descriptions, and, ultimately, interlinear translations of the texts.
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• Yogendra P. Yadava Royal Nepal Academy

  A Study of the Dhangar Language
  
  Dhangar is the only member of the Dravidian language family spoken in Nepal. It has been used by a minority in eastern Nepal but is facing gradual extinction for several reasons. Its speakers are scattered among predominantly Maithili speaking people, and the use of the national language Nepali is mandatory in schools and public life. Since restoration of democracy in 1990, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of the indigenous culture and the language that supports it. The present work will provide basic linguistic description which will be necessary for any serious language maintenance program. This will include the beginnings of work on linguistic affiliation, grammar, sociolinguistic perspectives, literacy and databased texts and lexicon.
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• Delphine Red Shirt Guilford, CT

  Winyan Isnala: My Mother's Story
  
  From her early days in North Dakota (see her autobiography "Bead on an Anthill", University of Nebraska Press, 1997), Red Shirt's mother was a source of wisdom, and recordings of their phone conversations and visits over the past several years included much of the history and lore of the Lakota people. Between the time of the submission of this grant and its being awarded, Red Shirt's mother passed away, making the transcription and editing of those texts even more urgent. The grant from ELF will help make that possible.
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• Yaron Matras University of Manchester

  A Description of the Domari Language of Jerusalem
  
  Domari is an Indic language spoken by a socially isolated and marginalized community of formerly itinerant metalworkers in the Old City of Jerusalem. It is one of several Indic diaspora languages spoken by communities that are thought to be descendants of artisans and entertainers spread throughout Central Asia, the Near East and Europe. All of the fluent speakers of Domari are over 40 years of age, most in their 60s, with Arabic taking its place. Very little description of the language exists, and Matras will begin a more complete description based on 20 hours of recordings already collected supplemented by further field work.
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• James T. Collins National University of Malaysia

  Documenting and Describing the Tola' Language
  
  Borneo is Asia's largest island, yet we know very little about the languages that are spoken there. Many previously ill-described areas are inhabited by autochthonous Dayak groups, speaking a number of diverse languages and dialects. With many of these dying out, it is imperative that information be collected before these links in this language ecology are lost forever. The language to be studied, Tola', is an undescribed Malayic variant spoken in four villages. One village already appears to have stopped transmitting Tola' to the younger generations, and the other three are now on a road which will undoubtedly provide further pressure on the language. Building on previous wordlists, Collins will begin work on a grammar and on a survey of language use and attitudes.
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• Hongkai Sun Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

  Recording the Last Fluent Speakers of Anong, a Language of Yunnan (PRC)
  
  The Anongs are a branch of the Nu nationality, numbering 7,300 but with only 50 or 60 fluent speakers of the ancestral language. The Anong language belongs to the Jingpo branch of Tibeto-Burman and resembles Dulong but is rather different from Nusu, the language of the main group of Nu people. Sun plans to augment his fieldwork from the early 1960s, aiming to collect 12,000 words for the dictionary, preserve the oral literature as far as possible, analyze the linguistic structure, make recordings, and assess the state of the language.
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• Silverio Jimenez Mexico City

  The Nahuatl from Milpa Alta
  
  The Nahuatl spoken in this area of Mexico is relatively conservative in its changes from the Aztec times. Although Nahuatl is Jimenez's heritage language, his own experience of learning only Spanish while growing up is indicative of the endangered state of this language. He will be using modern technology to help document that past, as embodied in the language and the stories of the elders. A growing sense of loss is leading to greater learning of the language by the young, but a lack of material makes this difficult. With ELF's help, Jimenez will begin to provide those materials.
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• Veronica M. Grondona University of Pittsburgh

  Material development for Bilingual Education among the Mocovi
  
  Mocovi is a Waikuruan language of approximately 4,000 speakers scattered in communities in the southern part of Chaco province and the northern part of Santa Fe province in Argentina. Increased contact with Spanish has led to a decline the use of Mocovi, and many speakers are migrating out of the area to look for better work opportunities, which further reduces the language's viability. Grondona intends to make the material from her 1998 Ph.D. dissertation more useful to the native community by using it as a basis for developing bilingual education materials. A few chapters of a textbook have already been completed, but further sections required by the Argentinian school curriculum need to be implemented. Grondona will assist native speakers of Mocovi in the development of these materials.
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• David VanBik Haka, Chin State, Burma

  Lai (Haka Chin)-English Dictionary
  
  In Burma, minority languages such as Lai are not allowed to be taught in the schools, and Burmese is increasingly dominant in the linguistic landscape. The availability of a dictionary from Lai into English will increase the value of the minority language by giving its speakers access to a world language without going through the national language. VanBik has already completed an English-Lai dictionary; the Lai-English version will be of more practical use to the native community and will allow the inclusion of material previously collected by the late Dr. Chester Strait, which includes many older lexical items that have become rare since the introduction of Christianity.
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• Daniel Aberra Addis Ababa University

  Morphological Analysis of Shabo
  
  The Shabo language of Ethiopia (also called Shaqqo or Mekeyir) is puzzling to linguists because it is distinct from both the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan families, the only two language families in Ethiopia. Even more remote families in Africa do not offer an obvious relationship. Daniel Aberra, of Addis Ababa University, has received a grant to do the necessary work to make the relationship of this language clear. The number of speakers is dwindling rapidly, and there is a large degree of language shift to one of the more prestigious neighboring languages, Majang or Shakicho (Mocha).
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• Ronald Geronimo Sells, AZ

  Illustration of a Tohono O'odham Text for Children
  
  The foot race has a time-honored position in Tohono O'odham culture, and Ronald Geronimo of the University of Arizona is planning to use it as a basis for a story in his native language. The text is intended for young readers, though it is hoped that older O'odham speakers will find it of interest as well. The final work will include not only the written version of the story, but specially designed illustrations. A cassette recording will also accompany the text, and will additionally include a small set of songs that were used by traditional foot racers from various O'odham villages. Geronimo hopes that this work will help stop the deterioration of the O'odham language by appealing to young readers and other members of their family.
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• Darrell R. Kipp Piegan Institute

  Immersion Learning of Blackfoot
  
  Darrell R. Kipp - Immersion Learning of Blackfoot The Piegan Institute, headed by Darrell Kipp, began building a school immersion program for Blackfoot in 1994. Since that time, two schools have been in operation, hosting forty children from pre-school through grade four. While the school buildings are functioning nicely, there is a lack of language material for the children and teachers to work with. With assistance from the Endangered Language Fund, Kipp plans to produce such material with the help not only of elders who grew up with the language but also from teachers who have become quite fluent in it. This community effort is beginning to bear fruit, with interest in the language increasing throughout the tribe.
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• Monica Macaulay University of Wisconsin

  Menominee Language and Linguistics
  
  Of more than 7,000 enrolled members of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, only 36 claim the ancestral language as their mother tongue, and a small group list it as their second language. In 1997, the Memoninee Legislature passed a bill requiring the use of Menominee for tribal purposes when possible and the teaching of the language on the reservation. Unfortunately, despite Leonard Bloomfield's major work on the language half a century ago, very little has been done since and so there is much that needs to be known for a practical language teaching program to be developed. Monica Macaulay of the University of Wisconsin has been asked to work with the Tribal College in developing these materials, and will use the grant from the Fund to do the necessary work with the remaining fluent speakers. The goal is a computerized language learning system that will be effective is retaining Menominee for the use of its community.
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• Eve Chuen Ng State University of New York, Buffalo

  The Structure of Passamaquoddy
  
  Passamaquoddy is an Eastern Algonquian language of northeastern Maine, with a closely related dialect, Maliseet, spoken in New Brunswick. Almost every speaker is over the age of 40, and those who are considered by their communities to be truly fluent are typically in their late 50s or older. There are fewer than 100 speakers of Passamaquoddy (and not more than 350 Maliseet speakers) making this a language in danger of being lost within the next one or two generations unless efforts at language maintenance are successful. Fortunately, many projects are under way, including this one by Eve Ng of the State University of New York, Buffalo. She will be collecting texts and providing linguistic analysis which will be incorporated into language preservation efforts.
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• Nile Thompson Seattle, WA

  Twana Language Use in Songs
  
  As the pressure of European expansion in Washington State increased in the 1800s, the 12 or so aboriginal Twana communities began settling on the Skokomish Reservation, leading to a loss of dialect diversity and, eventually, of the language itself. Currently, the Tribe's collective knowledge of its own language has come to reside in a few individuals who know a few common words and, more importantly, a set of traditional songs. For the current project, Nile Thompson of Dushuyay Research, Seattle, will record two elders who remember the Twana songs. These records serve two purposes: First, it will make it possible for the Twana to continue to weave the traditional songs into their daily lives and continue to pass them to their descendants. Second, the possible use of language switching within the songs, an important linguistic indication of group identification, will be available for study
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• Timothy Thornes University of Oregon

  Documentation of Burns Paiute
  
  The Northern Paiute language is the northern-most member of the Uto-Aztecan family, currently spoken by about 400 people in Nevada, Oregon, California and Idaho. The project undertaken by Timothy Thornes of the University of Oregon examines one of these communities, the one in Burns, Oregon. A wide range of texts will be recorded, including traditional tales, descriptions of culturally significant areas and the activities associated with them, family histories, autobiographical information of the elders, and natural conversation in the language. Each of these text types serves as a reservoir for different aspects of the language, the culture, and the history of the Burns Paiute community, and will be preserved and used for years to come.
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• Suzanne Wash U. California, Santa Barbara

  The Last Speakers of Northern Sierra Miwok
  
  Of the ten or so speakers of Northern Sierra Miwok still alive, the fluent ones are all at least 60 years of age. For records that will be essential to any future revival effort, and for the immediate value that such a linguistic legacy brings, Suzanne Wash of the University of California, Santa Barbara, received support from the Fund. Her work began in 1992 and has continued with support from the Phillips Fund. Apart from the value of the language artifacts to the descendants of the speakers, Northern Sierra Miwok presents an unusual pattern among languages: It uses both metathesis (exchanging consonants or vowels) and quantitative ablaut (lengthening of both consonants and vowels).
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• Mary Louise Defender Wilson Shields, ND

  Broadcasting in Dakotah on KLND
  
  When children are riding the bus to events on a Saturday afternoon, their driver can tune in to KLND, Little Eagle, South Dakota, and hear Dakotah language programming. They hear legends, talk, and even discussions of food. Teenagers are excited to hear things of interest to them in their own language, and older people say that they never expected to hear stories in their language again. It makes them feel good, and the younger people remark about how they never realized the wisdom and teaching in the stories. The grant from the Endangered Language Fund will allow Mary Louise Defender Wilson to travel and record more such stories and conversations so that Dakotah can continue to live on the airwaves of South Dakota.
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• Aklilu Yilma Addis Ababa University

  Recording the Last Speakers of Ongota
  
  Although Ethiopia is a linguistically diverse country, even there languages are becoming extinct. The small community of the Ongota, only 78 strong, have come to realize the predicament their language is in and have asked for help in preserving it. Aklilu Yilma, of Addis Ababa University, has received assistance from the Fund to provide that help. He has found that the language is so little known that its correct language family is not even known. His initial efforts, then, will be as full a description of the phonology, morphology and syntax as can be accomplished in the time he has available. Since most of the speakers are elderly, his work will be essential for any decision that is made by the community about the future of the language.
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• Alice Anderton Intertribal Wordpath Society

  Production of original television dramas in Choctaw and Creek
  
  Production of original television dramas in Choctaw and Creek. Awarded to Alice Anderton of the Intertribal Wordpath Society. This project will produce two dramas starring native speakers of these two Native American languages, which are currently spoken in Oklahoma. Captioned versions will be shown on cable access channels, and videotapes will be made available to the native speakers thoughout the state.
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• Mark Donohue University of Manchester

  Work on the Wasur languages of Indonesia
  
  Language data collection will be conducted for several languages in a region that has only recently been officially recognized as a distinct ethnic region.
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• Gary Holton University of California, Santa Barbara

  Tanacross language documentation project
  
  Tanacross, an Alaskan Athabaskan language, has only a handful of native speakers, most over sixty years of age. The goals of this work are to achieve a systematic documentation of the Tanacross grammar and lexicon, to provide literacy materials for speakers (including a conversational dictionary and collections of stories with English translations), and to contribute to our linguistic understanding of this little-studied language.
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• Andrej Kibrik University of Alaska

  Recording the last fluent speakers of Kuskokwim in Alaska
  
  This little-studied Athabaskan language is down to three households which use it regularly. The lingustic work will aid in the teaching of the younger generation, especially through the audio recordings that will give a much better sense of the feel of the language than written sources can.
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• Mary Linn University of Kansas

  Preserving Yuchi, a Native American isolate
  
  Only nineteen fluent speakers remain of the Yuchi language. Once they are gone, the Yuchi tribe will be unable to learn more of their heritage, and linguists will be unable to solve the mystery of the last remaining language isolate of the Eastern US. Linn's dissertation work will help on both fronts.
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• Rob Pensalfini MIT

  Preparing language materials for Jingulu of Australia
  
  Only about ten fluent speakers remain of this language, which is situated in the region between two major language families. Influences of both those families appear in the language, giving it many unique characteristics. Texts and a dictionary are being prepared, and the schools there are ready to make use of them.
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• Ronald Red Elk Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee

  Making a rediscovered manuscript useful to the Comanche community
  
  In 1996, a manuscript dictionary of Comanche, containing over 4,000 entries, was discovered in the Smithsonian. With the help of the Endangered Language Fund grant, this work will be combined with other sources and corrobarted with the remaining speakers of Comanche, so that future generations will have as complete a record of the language as possible.
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• Karen Somerville Gakeemaneh/Gignamoane, New Brunswick

  Immersion programs in Micmac, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy
  
  The speakers of these Eastern Algonquian languages have joined forces to try to further the use of the languages by the young. The ELF grant will help purchase equipment for several language immersion programs that are being developed.
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• Janne Underriner University of Oregon

  Recording the last two speakers of Klamath