Fieldwork and Language Documentation

The National Endowment for the Humanities, through its "Documenting Endangered Languages" grant program (in collaboration with the National Science Foundation), announced today that it will fund a project to be administered by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (PI Andrew Garrett, $332,762): "Archiving legacy documentation from southern California and the southwest: Toward a new collaborative model."

This two-year project will catalog, digitize, and describe sound recordings and paper materials assembled over many years by Berkeley professor emerita Leanne Hinton, Margaret Langdon (Berkeley PhD 1966), Frank Lobo, and Pamela Munro, making them accessible where appropriate in the California Language Archive. A key element of the project is collaboration with several Indigenous communities to create a model of co-curation and community-based description of materials we catalog. The grant will support a full-time postdoctoral position in the department to coordinate and supervise all the work.

Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Christine Sheil (PhD 2016) archived a new collection of sound recordings of 18 elicitation sessions on Scottish Gaelic (Indo-European; Scotland), stemming from her dissertation fieldwork there in 2013 and 2014. Wilson de Lima Silva (Arizona) archived a new collection on Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru), based on fieldwork in the Cidade de Deus neighborhood of Manaus, Brazil during his MA research at the University of Utah in 2004. There are sound recordings of elicitation, reading, and texts, as well as derivative materials like MA coursework and previously published booklets. We archived a new collection of sound recordings and written materials related to Chungli Ao (Ao; India), which derive from the 2008-2009 graduate field methods course (Linguistics 240) co-taught by Alice Gaby and Lev Michael, with language consultant Moa Imchen. The students in the course were Alex Bratkievich, Daniel Bruhn (PhD 2014), Ramón Escamilla (PhD 2012), Lindsey Newbold, Hannah Pritchett, Marilola Pérez (PhD 2015), and Russell Rhodes. Prof. Gaby is now at Monash University in Melbourne. We're grateful to undergraduate student Ellis Miller, who's working as an LRAP apprentice in the Survey this semester, for making the content descriptions for the items in this collection. Steve Parker (Dallas International University & SIL International) archived a new collection of field notes and sound recordings of Panobo/Huariapano (Panoan; Peru). Dating from 1991, these are the only known sound recordings of Panobo in existence, the language being thought to have no more first-language speakers. The consultant was Arquímedes Sinuiri Nunta.

Zach O'Hagan sends the following updates from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010) archived a new collection on Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan; CA, OR, ID, NV), based on 10 years of research with elders Grace Dick, Leona Cluette Dick, Morris Jack, Inez Jim, Elaine Lundy, Edith McCann, Harold Miller, and Jimmy Nez, and in collaboration with Molly Babel (PhD 2009) and Michael Houser (PhD 2010). The collection consists of 281 recordings of lexical and grammatical elicitation (as he writes, with a focus on "nominalization, clausal embedding, clause chaining, and aspect"), and texts. The project grew out of Andrew Garrett's 2005-2006 field methods course on the language. Conor Daly (PhD Slavic 1991) archived a new collection on Ninilchik Russian, a variety spoken on the Kenai Peninsula and surrounding region of southern Alaska. Based on fieldwork in July and August 1985, the collection consists of conversations, interviews, and linguistic work with 25 people. The five notebooks comprising Marvin Kramer's (PhD 2002) field notes from summers 1968 and 1969 on Kutenai (isolate; British Columbia, ID, MT) are now available (Kramer.002.001-Kramer.002.005). The consultants were Ambrose Gravelle, Catherine Gravelle, and Frank Whitehead. (Thanks to Alex Elias for assisting us in scanning these!)