Bebeli is one of the highly endangered Austronesian languages in the West New Britain region. Tok Pisin, a lingua franca in Papua New Guinea, is the dominant language in all domains among all generations of the Bebeli community. Children are not learning Bebeli anymore, and their parents do not teach it to them. There are about 780 speakers left. The last fluent speakers are in their 70s or older; those who are younger than 40 hardly understand the language. This situation is likely to continue or grow worse due to the area’s increasing accessibility and growing oil palm industry, which brings more contact with speakers of other languages. The main goals of the project are (1) to continue building a Bebeli corpus of annotated recordings, emphasizing culturally significant texts, and (2) to produce a comprehensive grammar and a topical dictionary of the language. The research will be conducted in two ways. First, the University of Hawai’i will serve as a base, and collaborative research will be conducted with several professors in the Linguistics Department there. Second, field research will be carried out on one extended field trip in the Bebeli area. The focus of the fieldwork will be on collecting a large amount of texts and annotating them as well as eliciting linguistic data. The data will be deposited with Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai’i Digital Ethnographic Archive for permanent archiving. (Edited by staff)

This project extends the on-going work of the applicant in documenting Circassian languages to include Hatkoy, an endangered and typologically unusual variety of Circassian which is no longer spoken in the Caucasus. The primary goals of the project are to create a linguistically analyzed and accessible database of recorded Hatkoy speech, and to investigate several hypothesis’s concerning Northwest Caucasian languages. The Hatkoy speech data will include 20 hours of audio materials, with time-aligned transcriptions, multi-tier annotations, “morpheme-to morpheme” and free translations into both English and Turkish. A second outcome of the project will be pedagogical materials for promoting language revitalization; this will be done considering the community’s strong interest in this aspect. The pedagogical materials will consist of wordlists, parts of speech, basic grammar and small texts (e.g. poems, songs). The applicant has prior data archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, and is discussion with the Endangered Language Archive (ELAR) and the Documentation of Endangered Languages program (DOBES) for arrangements to archive the data from the proposed project. The data will also be made available to the community in Turkey by the Caucasus Federation in Ankara. (Edited by staff)
 

Iquito is a critically endangered Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia. With only 18 speakers remaining, at a median age of 70, timely documentation of Iquito is essential not only for knowledge of this remarkable language, but also for comparative work on Zaparoan, which will inform our knowledge of the deep social and cultural history of the Zaparoan peoples and western Amazonia more generally. During a DEL fellowship tenure, I will complete two key components of my ongoing work to document Iquito: 1) preparation of parallel English-Iquito and Spanish-Iquito versions of a bilingual Iquito dictionary, which already exists in draft form; 2) write an extensive morphological description of Iquito; and 3) collaborate with Christine Beier on parsing a large corpus of Iquito texts. Beier and I are each submitting DEL fellowship proposals to collaborate on a single documentation project in which we are responsible for complementary but integrated aspects of the overall project. Beier’s work centers on the Iquito text corpus, with the two projects overlapping on the morphological parsing of these texts. The fellowship will provide me with 11 months of support during my 2015-2016 sabbatical year. Beier and I and the Iquito consultants feel it is urgent to bring the documentation of Iquito to a successful conclusion within the next few years while the opportunity to work with multiple consultants remains. (Edited by staff)

The goal of this fellowship project, A Dictionary of Misantla Totonac, is to produce a trilingual (Totonac/Spanish/English) analytical dictionary and an extensive corpus of Misantla Totonac, an endangered Mesoamerican language spoken by fewer than 200 individuals in Yecualta and nearby communities in the Mexican state of Veracruz.  The dictionary, of at least 5000 lexical items, will be produced in both print and electronic versions.  The project will also result in a corpus of audio and video recordings of naturally occurring speech in different genres (e.g. narratives, conversations, jokes, personal histories, community history, descriptions of current and traditional uses of local flora and fauna and of culturally important activities and events).  These materials, to be archived at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin, will provide the remaining elderly speakers of Totonac and younger non-Totonac-speaking members of the communities with a basis for developing meaningful and coherent strategies of revitalization and preservation.   The project will supplement other work that the PI and Carolyn MacKay have done on Misantla Totonac since the 1980s. The PI and MacKay are each applying for a one-year fellowship (August 2015-July 2016) in Mexico to devote their time exclusively to the documentation effort.   The PI believes that he and MacKay can accomplish the work of this project within a year.  (Edited by staff)

The purpose of this project is to continue the PI’s work documenting and preserving Ponosakan, an Austronesian language spoken in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. Once the majority language throughout the town of Belang, Ponosakan has long since been fully supplanted by regional lingua franca Melayu Manado. There are now only four surviving speakers who are communicatively-competent, ages 70, 80, 86, and 90, and all four have signed a letter expressing their willingness to continue working on this project.  The only scholar to have conducted ongoing language research on Ponosakan, the PI has made several trips to Belang over the past eight years, assessing the competency of the remaining speakers, eliciting wordlists and sentences, building a lexical database, and making dozens of hours of archive-quality digital audio recordings.  The main work to be performed during the fellowship period is: (1) to transcribe and translate around 20 hours of the digital audio recordings; (2) to expand the lexical database with all of the new vocabulary found in the transcribed recordings; and (3) to expand the Ponosakan sketch grammar. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork and research to produce a verb grammar of the endangered Yellowknife dialect, a Northern Athabaskan language variety, spoken in northwestern Canada.

This project proposes to write a verb grammar of Tetso’t’iné Yatié or Yellowknife (Ethnologue code: chp), a dialect of Dëne Suliné (Chipewyan) previously claimed to have gone extinct in 1928. The project builds on the author’s previous work with the Yellowknives Dene, funded by NSF-1204171 under the Polar Postdoctoral Program from 2013-15 (Phonetics and Phonology of Two Northern Athabaskan Languages). The verb grammar will be loosely modeled on Keren Rice’s 1989 A Grammar of Slave, and will exhaustively catalogue the phonological behavior of every conjugation marker in every mode and classifier and in every position, as well as cataloguing every possible verb theme category and derivational string. Keren Rice has agreed to be involved in this project to ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data, from an Athapaskanist perspective. The finished products will be a print version of the verb grammar, to be published through Alaska Native Language Center Publications, and an electronic version with clickable text and sound files.

Fieldwork and research for the preparation of a grammar and dictionary on the endangered Ponosakan language of Sulawesi, Indonesia.

This project is intended to continue work documenting and preserving Ponosakan, a near-extinct Austronesian language of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Once the majority language the town of Belang, Ponosakan has long since been fully supplanted in all contexts by Manado Malay, the regional lingua franca. There are now only four surviving communicatively-competent speakers, aged 71, 81, 87, and 91, and all four have expressed their willingess to continue working on this project. On several trips to Belang over the past nine years, Lobel has elicited wordlists and sentences, built a lexical database, made archive-quality digital audio recordings of the four surviving Ponosakan speakers covering a wide range of subject matter, and transcribed and translated these recordings. The main work to be performed during the fellowship period is: (1) to complete a full reference grammar; and (2) to complete a Ponosakan dictionary based on the PI’s lexical database, which currently contains over 2,200 roots. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork and research to create a grammar of Pisaflores Tepehua, an endangered language of Mexico.

The goal of this project is to produce a comprehensive grammar and corpus of spontaneous speech of Pisaflores Tepehua (ISO: tpp), an endangered Totonac-Tepehua language spoken by a little over 2000 individuals in Pisaflores, Veracruz, and the nearby communities in Mexico. The grammar will be produced in both English and Spanish and will be made available both in print and online. It will be accompanied by a large corpus of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring speech, as well as recordings of all sessions of elicitation and transcription. These materials will augment the existing collection of Pisaflores Tepehua language materials currently archived in the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas at Austin. The products of this project will supplement the dictionary of the language currently being completed by the PI and Frank Trechsel. The grammar, the existing dictionary, and the enlarged corpus, together with recordings of elicitation and transcription sessions, will document a broad sample of Pisaflores Tepehua discourse practices. (Edited by staff)

Research and writing of a translation into English, with commentary, of the oral traditions of Russia's Koryak people, who are located near the Bering Sea and whose language is endangered.

Koryak is a language indigenous to the Kamchatka, Russia, region. There are no fully fluent speakers under the age of 50, and very few children have even partial ability in the language. Language endangerment is caused by a history of colonialism and continues due to subtle, ongoing oppression of Koryaks and other indigenous people. Due to symbolic and material domination, Koryaks are shifting away from speaking the Koryak language. My project will result in publication of an English translation of Koryak oral literature, with commentary, that will bring Koryak myths, legends of local heroes, oral histories, and indigenous experiences of Sovietization to an English-reading world audience. The commentary employs ethnopoetic analysis, elucidating formal linguistic patterns that reflect traditional Koryak ways of conceptualizing the world. Related products include the writing and publication of journal articles, a Russian translation of the Koryak stories, and a DVD on the project’s storytellers with subtitles in Koryak, Russian, and English. Material generated by this project will be added to the PI’s current archive deposit at ELAR (the Endangered Language Archive), based at SOAS (the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies). (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork and research to produce documentation of Daats'iin, a newly discovered and endangered language of western Ethiopia.

Daats’iin is a heretofore unknown language spoken in two villages in northwestern Ethiopia’s Amhara region, near the border with the Republic of Sudan. The estimated native-speaker population is 300-1,000. The language has only recently been identified as distinct from Gumuz, the language of a neighboring group, and it is endangered due to pressures from that group and from two other languages of wider communication in the Sudan-Ethiopia borderlands: Arabic, used in matters of trade and religion, and Amharic, the lingua franca of the surrounding Amhara region. The dominance of Arabic and Amharic coupled with Daats’iin’s small population size and lack of official recognition renders the Daats’iin language vulnerable. My proposed project will result in an eight-to-ten-hour audio corpus and a two-hour video corpus of spoken texts, one hour of transcribed text including interlinearized English glosses, a preliminary Daats’iin lexicon of 3,000 entries with both English and Amharic translations and example sentences, and a journal article on the phonology of the language. All collected texts will be archived with SIL (the Summer Institute of Linguistics Language and Culture Archives) and ALORA (the Archive of Languages and Oral Resources of Africa). (Edited by staff)

Research and analysis to complete a bidirectional dictionary of Ventureño, a dormant language of the Chumash family of central and southern coastal California, and English.

The Chumash languages of central and southern coastal California have become functionally extinct within the last 45 years. Much tribal cultural knowledge, however, is still alive, and there are several living individuals who have heard the language spoken and can recall words. Although Chumash languages are known in niche topics in linguistics (e.g., reduplication), there are few readily available materials that the public can access—the major exception being Applegate's Samala (Inese'o Chumash) dictionary (Applegate & Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians 2007). This project will complete and produce a dictionary of one of the most heavily-documented Chumash languages: Ventureño (veo), primarily the Mitsqanaqa' dialect. A preliminary dictionary has been compiled by the PI, but a lack of resources has prevented the completion of the work, including revisions, corrections, and additions. The project also will explore and resolve questions about what is needed to make a dictionary useful to both scholars and to laypersons and heritage learners. Consideration will be given to the fact that heritage learners have varying levels of experience with the technical language common in linguistic descriptions. The data will be archived at Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's digital language archive, and at the University of California, Berkeley, California Language Archive. (Edited by staff)

Research and analysis in preparation of a book of Northern Paiute folktales and autobiographical narratives that document the language and history of the Wadateka’a in Harney Valley, Oregon.

The Wadateka'a Nadeguyengana: Harney Valley Paiute Stories project involves the preparation of recorded narratives in the Northern Paiute language (categorized as Western Numic, Uto-Aztecan) as spoken by a few remaining speakers on the Burns Paiute reservation in Harney Valley, Oregon. The present-day community is part of the band known as the Wadateka'a (seepweed seed-eaters). The goal of the project is to complete the thorough transcription, analysis and translation of more than 70 narratives of various genres for publication as a book. As a critically endangered language, such material in Northern Paiute is not widely available. The final product will include supplemental material in the form of basic grammatical information, a detailed description of the writing system, and photos, maps, and drawings. The selection and vetting of the material by the community is ongoing, as feedback has already been solicited and received on draft portions modeled upon what will be the final product. The publication will serve both the field of linguistics and the various communities that identify the language as a fundamental part of their cultural heritage. Tribes are interested in capturing elements of history that take the perspective of the community more fully into account. Such history, in the form of folktales and legends as well as ethno-historical and autobiographical narrative in the indigenous language, is invaluable to the task of reclaiming and asserting that perspective. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork to record and analyze conversations in Salish by elders from the Native American Pend d'Oreille community in western Montana.

Salish (also known as Flathead Salish, Montana Salish, or more specifically by the dialects Bitteroot Salish-Seliš and Pend d’Oreille-Qlispé), is the traditional language of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille community of western Montana. The extremely endangered language belongs to the dialect continuum of Spokane-Kalispel-Pend d’Oreille(s)-Flathead within the Southern Interior branch of the Salishan language family. There are fewer than 20 fluent speakers remaining, the majority of whom are elders over the age of 70. This proposed project will analyze ten previously recorded narratives, chosen by the tribe, and will document and analyze approximately four additional stories from different speakers. Through the analysis of oral storytelling, this project seeks to accomplish the following goals: (1) determine the linguistic features that enact these oral dialogues as narratives or traditional stories through the interlinearization process; (2) determine how these narratives further perpetuate cultural knowledge, understanding, and identity; and (3) contribute to the efforts of the Salish- Pend d’Oreille in the documentation and understanding of their traditional language. (Edited by staff)

Analyzing and digitizing a variety of texts (folktales and other stories, prayers, song lyrics) in Cahto, a Native American language from Northern California.

The goal of Analysis and Documentation of Cahto Language (ktw) Texts is to morphologically and syntactically analyze legacy texts in the Cahto language of Mendocino County, California (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family). This work will make the texts available to scholars and to the Tribe, and also provide a basis for the future creation of a reference grammar of Cahto. The twelve-month period of the fellowship will allow for analysis of at least fifteen of the Bill Ray/Pliny Earle Goddard longer texts of stories, folktales, description of folk characters and practices, and one full-length prayer (Goddard, 1909; Goddard, 1902, 1906). The applicant will also analyze a number of one- or two-line texts (song lyrics, short prayers, etc.) recorded by other researchers, primarily E. M. Loeb (1932). The applicant will systematically phonemicize the texts into the practical orthography used by the Cahto Tribe and represented in the Applicant's 2018 NEH-funded Cahto Dictionary (DEL #FN-255579-17). The text analysis will be done using the same linguistic database software (SIL's FLex/FieldWorks) that produced the Dictionary, allowing easy interlinking between dictionary entries and text examples. FLex database software is a standard platform among linguists for lexical and text documentation. Fieldwork supported by this Fellowship will link the texts, collected over a century ago, with contemporary knowledge in the community. The Applicant is already aware of versions of the stories still told in English, as well as traditional lifeways and technologies reflected in the texts that are still practiced and passed down. Documenting these connections represents a significant secondary goal of the project.

Preparation of almost fifty hours of video recordings in Tlingit, an endangered language of Coastal Alaska for archiving and online access (transcription, translation, annotation, and post-production).

The vitality of Tlingit, a member of the Na-Dene family, is rated 8a – moribund (Alaska Native Language Center 2007) on the EGIDScale (Lewis and Simmons 2010). Between 2007 and 2013, the Tlingit Conversation Documentation project, NSF-DEL # 0651787 and # 0852788, recorded spontaneous Tlingit conversations. The production exceeded the project’s goals, leaving additional material to be completed. For the fellowship proposed here, the PI, with five or more L1 Tlingit speakers, University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) Tlingit language faculty, and undergraduate students in advanced Tlingit courses will use ELAN software to complete the remaining 27.9 hours of Tlingit transcription, 7.5 hours of English translation, and preparation of a Tlingit/English print version for each of the 96 recordings in the 48.5 hour corpus. We will prepare the remaining 20 hours of bilingual subtitled videos for web posting of the recordings. We will archive all results from this fellowship with the previously recorded material at the Alaska State Library, Archives, and Museum and the Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) William L. Paul, Sr. Archive. Because of its broad range of content, this primary source video material from the mouths of L1 Tlingit speakers, with the added value of translation and transcription, will be of use by linguists, ethnographers, archeologists, historians, anthropologists, artists, musicologists, and others. (Edited by staff)

Translation and annotation of audio recordings for a community- and scholar-accessible online repository of the Native American Gitksan language spoken in Alaska and British Columbia.

Gitksan is the traditional language of the Gitxsan people of Alaska and the northern interior of British Columbia. It is the easternmost member of the Tsimshianic family and highly endangered, with an estimated 300-500 native speakers in their late 50s, at the youngest. Language shift toward English is well underway, in large part due to the effects of the Canadian residential school policy of the 20th century, making the need for language documentation increasingly urgent. Essentially, all documentary work on Gitksan has been conducted in the last 40 years; existing resources include an unpublished grammar, a few short lessons and stories, and several wordlists and phrasebooks of varying levels of detail. There are many areas yet undocumented.
The project's primary goal is the development of a online text repository with several functions:
1) a community-accessible body of narratives and conversations,
2) a base of sample sentences for an existing community-accessible online dictionary in active
development at the University of British Columbia, and
3) a corpus for linguists working on Gitksan to view long-form narrative or conversational data. (Edited by staff)

Fieldwork to document and analyze Seke, an endangered language from the southeastern Himalayan region, through audio and video recordings of stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and histories of Seke speakers.

This project aims to build on completed fieldwork to further the documentation of Seke, an endangered and little-documented Tibeto-Burman language of the Tamangic branch, through the creation of a rich, annotated, multi-dialectal corpus of video and audio recordings including stories, oral histories, and a range of other narratives reflecting the lives and stories of Seke speakers. The resulting electronic corpus and outputs will serve both community members and scholars. Seke is one of the least well-known languages of the increasingly well-documented but still relatively little-known Tamangic branch within the Tibeto-Burman language family. Without sustained documentation or virtually any multimedia record, Seke has remained a missing link in our understanding of the branch, being both geographically and typologically at the edge of the Tamangic world and completely surrounded by the Tibetic language Loke. The Seke-speaking area was once considerably larger, and a record of Seke would be significant for our understanding of the cultural, demographic, and natural history of the region. In the context of heavy language contact and outmigration, regional patterns of multilingualism encompassing Seke, Loke, Thakali, Tibetan, Nepali, and now English are shifting rapidly, also a process worthy of study. (Edited by staff)

Research leading to publication of a grammar sketch, a lexicon, and narratives of three undocumented Jarawan languages (Mbat, Galamkya, and Duguri), a group of African Bantu languages.

This proposal seeks funds to support full-time research on Jarawan languages over Summers 2021 and 2022. These languages are essentially undocumented and represent a gap in the linguistic record. What little is known suggests they occupy a place that is intermediate between Narrow Bantu and Southern Bantoid, a longstanding point of divergence in the Bantu expansion from West-Central Africa. The project will focus on data collection and analysis of three Jarawan languages - Mbat (iso:bau), Galamkya, and Duguri (iso:dbm) - and will produce a grammar sketch, lexicon, and narratives aimed both at elucidating their place in the classificatory record and at providing a foundation for their maintenance and preservation. Materials produced will be stored in the Endangered Language Archive (ELAR)

Research and writing of a bilingual, multidialectal dictionary of Yaminahua (ISO 639-3: yaa), Nahua (ISO 639-3: mts), and Sharanahua (ISO 639-3: mcd), three Panoan languages of the Peruvian Amazon

This project will produce comparative documentation and description for Yaminahua (ISO 639-3: yaa), Nahua (ISO 639-3: mts), and Sharanahua (ISO 639-3: mcd), three closely related, endangered Panoan languages of the Peruvian Amazon. The concrete products of this project include a bilingual, multi-dialectal dictionary of these languages with indices in Spanish and English, and a comparative description of the morphology (e.g. prefixes and suffixes) of the study languages. More broadly, the project seeks to enhance the understanding of the diversification of related languages in contexts where geographic isolation and contact with unrelated languages are not significant factors. The fellowship will support 12 months of full-time work consisting of fieldwork in Peru; transcription, translation, and analysis of primary data; and the preparation of materials and publications. Primary data and resulting products will be archived with the California Language Archive.

Development of a bilingual lexical database and grammatically analyzed corpus of Michif, a highly endangered Indigenous contact language spoken by fewer than 100 members of the Métis Nation, primarily in small, diasporic communities across a vast area of western Canada and the northern USA. 

Michif [crg] is a highly endangered Indigenous contact language spoken by fewer than 100 members of the Métis Nation, primarily in small, diasporic communities across a vast area of western Canada and the northern USA. As the result of historical multilingualism involving both Algonquian and French languages, Michif interweaves grammatical and lexical elements from both language families into a single, complex system, showing little of the linguistic simplification often associated with the outcomes of language contact. Through linguistic consultation with Michif speakers, this project aims to develop a bilingual lexical database and grammatically analyzed corpus of Michif based on a seminal dictionary of the language. The resulting digital resources will result in much improved long-term access to a central resource for studies of Michif, as well as a much clearer view on the outcomes of language contact in a typologically exceptional and critically endangered contact language.

Research and writing leading to a book on the analysis of legacy texts in the Cahto language, an indigenous language of Mendocino County, California.

The goal of this project is to analyze legacy texts in the Cahto language (ktw) of Mendocino County, California (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family), making the texts available to scholars and to the Tribe, and providing a basis for a future Cahto grammar. At least eight of the stories and folktales, including four of the longest extant texts (Goddard, 1909; Goddard, 1902, 1906) will be analyzed in the twelve-month Fellowship period. The Applicant will phonemicize the texts into the practical writing system used by the Cahto Tribe and in the Applicant's previous NEH-funded Cahto projects. The analysis will use the same linguistic database software (SIL's FLex/FieldWorks) as the Dictionary and previous Texts, allowing easy interlinking between dictionary entries and text examples. Fieldwork supported by this Fellowship will link the texts with contemporary community knowledge, including versions of stories still told in English, and other traditions reflected in the texts.

Research and writing of a book presenting a comparative analysis of grammatical descriptions of Iquito, an endangered Zaparoan language of the northern Peruvian Amazonia.

This project advances the documentation and description of Iquito (ISO 639-3: iqu), a critically endangered Zaparoan language of northern Peruvian Amazonia, with a focus on its complex tonal system. Core activities are transcription, parsing, and analysis of texts from circa 1960; re-parsing of re-analyzed texts from 2002-2018; and comparative analysis of these texts to inform ongoing grammatical description of Iquito. Because Iquito's tonal system includes both boundary Hs and HLL melodies that surface in multiple domains and across word boundaries, text-based analysis of connected speech is an indispensable tool for discovery. Thorough documentation of Iquito's tonal system will inform the typology of tone in Amazonia, and contribute to cross-linguistic typology and theories of grammatical tone. New textual data will also speak to other typologically unusual phenomena found in Iquito, including discontinuous constituency and the expression of reality status through word order.

Research and writing of a comprehensive reference grammar of Itunyoso Triqui (ISO [trq]), an endangered Southern Mexican language.

This project supports the creation of a comprehensive reference grammar of Itunyoso Triqui (ISO [trq]), an endangered American Indian language in the Otomanguean family spoken in Southern Mexico the United States. This work will represent the first reference grammar written for any Triqui language and vastly enhance our understanding of these unique languages. The grammar builds on a body of work produced by the PI on various linguistic aspects of the language, including studies on its complex system of tones, unique word formation strategies, the complex system of possession, and the elaborate system of final particles. The project will also capitalize on an extensive set of documentation materials (recordings, transcriptions) previously produced for the language. All recordings and materials will be archived in the publicly-accessible Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Funding will support consultation with Triqui speakers, travel to Mexico, and archiving.

Annotating words that appear in a corpus of Nishnaabemwin, a native language of Canada and the USA, to their entries in an online bilingual dictionary, and building a search function for both.

Link the words in a collection of Nishnaabemwin texts to their entries in an online bilingual dictionary. The Nishnaabemwin dialects of Ojibwe (Algonquian, Great Lakes region, ISO codes otw, ojg) are moribund, but there is great community interest in teaching tools. This project will link the texts associated with the Algonquian Dictionary Project's online dictionary of Nishnaabemwin (based at Carleton University), so that language learners can search for words in the dictionary and immediately see examples of words in use. The PI has carried out pilot work producing glossaries for texts from M'Chigeeng First Nation (Corbiere 2019, Armstrong et al 2022). These texts and others may be added to the corpus. Additionally, the linking process furnishes naturalistic data to better understand the reaction to a vowel deletion rule that emerged in the early 20th century, and the existence of a linked corpus is a major benefit for further lexicographic and grammatical work.

Research and writing of a dictionary for Diidxaza, a language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, and translating the dictionary into Spanish and English. 

Diidxaza (aka: Isthmus Zapotec iso:zai) is an Indigenous Mesoamerican language of the Central Core Zapotec branch of the Otomanguean stock. The project is to complete a publishable manuscript of a 10,000-entry dictionary of Diidxaza with Spanish and English equivalents. This dictionary is the culmination of 20 years of field-based data collection and analysis. The performance period will focus on data synthesis and on writing Spanish and English equivalents for publication in Dictionaria, an online, open access and peer-reviewed dictionary journal. The unparalleled extensive scope of this dictionary and the online and open access will make data available for the advancement of the study of Mesoamerican languages and benefit instruction and revitalization of Diidxaza.