LINGUIST List 11.151

Mon Jan 24 2000

FYI: Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. whalen, Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants

	

	
	FYI: Endangered Language Fund 1999 Grants
	
	 The Endangered Language Fund is pleased to announce its grant 
	awards for 1999. The Fund is a nonprofit organization dedicated to 
	the scientific description of endangered languages, support for 
	maintenance efforts, and dissemination of the results of those two 
	effort to the scholarly community and the native communities. These 
	twelve grants received almost $20,000 in funding, made possible 
	entirely by the support of our members. Please visit our web site at 
	http://www.ling.yale.edu/~elf.
	 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. This is an 
	indigenous effort to provide educational materials which brings the 
	generations together in a single project. 
	 Marianne Milligan (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Menominee 
	Phonology and Morphology. Only a few speakers of Menominee remain, 
	and they show varying degrees of fluency. The 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.
	 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 Conference in 
	Tucson, AZ, this past June. 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.
	 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. The 
	texts and elicited words will be used for a dictionary, grammatical 
	descriptions, and, ultimately, interlinear translations of the texts.
	 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. 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.
	 Delphine Red Shirt (Guilford, CT), Winyan Isnala: My Mother's 
	Story. From her early days in North Dakota, 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.
	 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 in the Old City of 
	Jerusalem. 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.
	 James T. Collins (National University of Malaysia), Documenting 
	and Describing the Tola' Language. Many previously ill-described 
	areas of Borneo are inhabited by autochthonous Dayak groups, speaking 
	a number of diverse languages and dialects. The language to be 
	studied, Tola', is an undescribed Malayic variant spoken in four 
	villages. Building on previous wordlists, Collins will begin work on 
	a grammar and on a survey of language use and attitudes.
	 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. 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.
	 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. 
	 Veronica M. Grondona (University of Pittsburgh), Material 
	development for Bilingual Education among the Mocovi. Mocovi is a 
	Waikuruan language of approximately 4,000 speakers 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. Grondona intends to use the material from her 
	1998 Ph.D. dissertation as a basis for developing bilingual education 
	materials. Grondona will assist native speakers of Mocovi in the 
	development of these materials.
	 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.