The Karuk dictionary and text project, led by Andrew Garrett and Line Mikkelsen, aims to create comprehensive and usable online research, teaching, and learning tools for Karuk, an indigenous language of northern California with fewer than a dozen first-language speakers. We have made an interactive online version of a dictionary created by Bill Bright and Susan Gehr, and are augmenting it with audio recordings from current fieldwork. We are also digitizing and annotating published texts and integrating these with the online dictionary, and creating practical descriptions of Karuk grammar. The next phase is the creation of a Karuk treebank (parsed syntactic corpus). This will contain published texts and unexamined audio material from earlier fieldwork by a variety of scholars. The Karuk treebank will also be integrated with the online dictionary, yielding a unparalled, open-access resource for endangered language work.
August 9, 2013