Northern Caddoan Languages Documentation Project

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Douglas Parks and colleagues will conduct one year of linguistic research documenting South Band Pawnee, Skiri Pawnee, and Arikara. These languages belong to the Caddoan language family spoken on the Great Plains from Texas to North Dakota. Fluent speakers of these three languages are no longer living. Most of the linguistic data included in the project were recorded by the PI between 1965 and 2001. There are two aspects of linguistic documentation in this project: bilingual dictionaries and analyzed text collections (the latter primarily traditional stories, such as myths and tales) for each of the three languages. These materials will be made available on the World Wide Web. An integral aspect of the project is completion of software begun under a previous NSF grant. That software facilitates the development of multimedia dictionaries and analyzed text collections in a single working environment. This project contributes to the long tradition in anthropology and linguistics of scientific documentation of American Indian languages. Such study contributes to the understanding of linguistic diversity in human speech worldwide and to the understanding of the interrelationships and historical development of American Indian languages. It also preserves a record of the fast disappearing Native American languages. Since South Band Pawnee, Skiri Pawnee, and Arikara are closely related to one another, comparison among them will offer insights into the development of the Caddoan language family and, more generally, processes of language change. Because these languages share exceptionally complex verb structures, their documentation will provide linguists with a large amount of new data for the theoretical study of language history and structure. The software completed by this project will serve as a valuable tool to aid description and analysis of endangered languages worldwide. Finally, the dictionaries and texts will provide critically needed resources for the three tribes in their efforts to revive and teach their native languages, and to perpetuate their cultures.