Plains Indian Sign Language DEL Project: Summer 2010 Meeting and Workshops

University Of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) Documentation Workshop, Summer 2010 With support of the NSF DEL program, co-PIs and sign language linguists Dr. Jeffrey Davis (University of Tennessee) and Melanie McKay-Cody (Chickamauga Cherokee/Choctaw, William Woods University) are conducting the first fieldwork in over 50 years to focus on the linguistic structure of Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). Based on recent fieldwork in 2009, the co-PIs have identified more than two-dozen PISL signers, including women and deaf tribal members, from among the Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, and Mandan-Hidatsa. This demonstrates that PISL continues to be used within Plains tribal groups and still functions as an intertribal signed lingua franca. Formal linguistic documentation and description of PISL has been long overdue, and this workshop will present the latest findings and insights about the linguistic nature and structure of PISL, the outcomes of signed language-spoken language contact, and the conveyance of human language in signed and spoken modalities. The workshop will be held on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, August 2010; and, will involve participants from several tribal groups and colleges. In collaboration with personnel from Montana State University, Billings, Little Bighorn National Monument, and Dull Knife Memorial College, it will be widely publicized and it is anticipated that more PISL signers will be identified. The workshop will showcase and disseminate recent findings about PISL usage, lexicon, and grammar. For the first time, it will bring together sign language linguists and Deaf and American Indian individuals to train them in linguistics, field methods, and language documentation technologies (e.g. ELAN). Working with Native signers, the co-PIs are transcribing/glossing and translating PISL using ELAN; identifying lexical-grammatical categories; and, conducting comparative syntactic analyses. These findings will be submitted to peer-reviewed linguistic research journals, contribute to the compilation of a PISL dictionary with grammatical descriptions, and integrated into the project website/online digital archive of American Indian sign language documentary materials, so that the broadest possible audiences will have access to them.