Alutiiq Living Words Project

Alutiiq Heritage Foundation, Kodiak AK

Investigators

Abstract

Alutiiq, an Eskimoan language once widely spoken in southcentral Alaska, is endangered today. Within the Alutiiq world, the Kodiak Alutiiq dialect is particularly threatened, with fewer than 35 elderly speakers scattered among isolated, rural communities in the Kodiak Archipelago. Although uniquely placed at the southern extent of the Eskimoan language family, Alutiiq is one of the least-studied Alaska Native languages. Alutiiq Living Words is a project headed by Sven D. Haakanson and April Counceller, and it is funded by the National Science Foundation. Housed at the Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository, this three-year community-based research effort will document rapidly vanishing forms of Kodiak Alutiiq oratory, linguistic knowledge, and place names. To document Alutiiq oratory, semi-fluent field researchers (primarily Alutiiq people) will work closely with Kodiak Alutiiq speakers to make digital audio and visual recordings. Efforts will focus on the eldest and most fluent speakers, many of whom are over 80 years old. The recordings will be transcribed and indexed by project staff, transferred to CD and DVD, and archived both at the Alutiiq Museum and the University of Alaska's Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC). In addition to new recordings, selected older recordings from ANLC and the Alutiiq Museum's archives will be digitized, transcribed, and translated. To document and preserve linguistic place name information, research notes taken by Dr. Jeff Leer of ANLC will be verified with modern speakers, and compiled in an interactive multimedia Kodiak Archipelago place-names map for the web site. In addition to contributing place-names data, he will act as the project's Faculty Associate, editing Alutiiq language text and guiding the interpretation of selected oratory. Another objective is to form a New Words Council (NWC) of fluent speakers and semi-fluent project staff, who will develop new words for the language. Modeled after the successful Hawaiian Lexicon Committee, this group will document aspects of Alutiiq language revitalization in practice, as the community advances towards a healthier language status. New words, recordings of these words, and documentation of the word-creation process will be included in the project's online database and disseminated in a printed new words guide.