NSF Award
1641556
At least half of the 7,000 languages worldwide will cease to be spoken by the end of the current century. Native American languages represent a portion of those languages that will fall silent, that is, have no remaining first language fluent speakers. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. Many Native American communities are working hard to create new speakers while elder speakers are still here. One challenge in creating new speakers is the lack of effective teaching materials. Another challenge is having a deep enough understanding of the complexities of the particular language, since a deeper linguistic understanding of a language can be used to train teachers, to develop effective pedagogical resources, and to help learners move from beginner levels to more intermediate and advanced levels of complexity. Other challenges include the lack of adequate language documentation and resources, including dictionaries and reference grammars. Cases of successful language revitalization often involve partnerships between tribal communities and organizations with linguists and other academics. Those partnerships often take years to develop, but their results include broader impacts like Native Americans earning degrees and other credentials in linguistics and other social sciences. In this project, a workshop and follow up meetings will be held to try to address these challenges and develop support for language restoration for Dakota, a Native American language of the Upper Midwest. This will bring together linguists, computer scientists, and tribal experts in the Dakota language. Broader impacts include capacity building in the social sciences and computational infrastructure in the tribe's educational department and tribal college, the development of better electronic and other resources to support Dakota language learning, and potential opportunities for undergraduates at two institutions to participate in authentic research experiences in linguistics.<br/><br/>Participants in these workshops to support the Dakota language include the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in eastern South Dakota, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Dakotah Language Institute, and Carleton College in southern Minnesota. Dakota is a member of the large Siouan language family, spoken from Canada to Arkansas with a number of close relatives in the Upper Midwest, but all are endangered, with some severely threatened and even lacking first language speakers. The Dakotah Language Institute of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and Carleton will explore the documentation, analysis, preservation, and revitalization of Dakota at a two-day workshop in August 2016, and follow up with a subsequent meeting at Sisseton-Wahpeton in the fall. Funding will also cover the costs of attending the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January 2017 for tribal educators, including those at the tribal college, and Carleton College participants. This conference is the premier annual meeting of American linguists and is the largest gathering each year of those who focus on Native American languages. The goal of these activities is to bring together potential partners in the work to create a thorough, up-to-date description of the language, and developing tools and materials to facilitate instruction in Dakota to children. One long-term goal of the project is to develop a clear analysis of Dakota that is informed by current language science. A second goal is to construct an array of resources for classroom and extracurricular use at the Oyate. The NSF Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUP) program in EHR is providing support for tribal college participation in this project.
