Collaborative Research: Recording Toponyms to Document the Endangered Hopi Language

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

With funding from the NSF Documenting Endangered Language Program, the University of Arizona and the American Museum of Natural History are collaborating with the Hopi Tribe to record toponyms (place names) as a means of documenting the endangered Hopi language. While most Hopis over the age of fifty learned Hopi as their first language, and remain fluent, today less that 5% of Hopis younger than nineteen speak the language. As senior speakers pass away, knowledge of toponyms and the cultural practices they encode is being lost. The project will produce a lexicon of toponyms using digital audio and video files to preserve the sounds of the names vocalized by native speakers of Hopi. These place names will be transcribed using a standard orthography developed by the Hopi Tribe. Cultural, social, historical, and geographical information about each place name will be documented in a geographic information systems database. The toponyms to be documented during this project constitute a potent and understudied linguistic domain. In Hopi discourse, important ideas and processes involving cultural and historical order are localized, commemorated in the landscape, and indexed by place names. Events happened at particular places: an understanding of events is embedded in place names, so knowledge of those places and an understanding of place-names are needed to fully document Hopi language and history. The working hypothesis for the project is that the Hopi have a systematic theory of place and place-naming that has not received the scholarly attention necessary for scholarly comprehension. This research project will articulate a grounded theory of Hopi toponyms to create a body of knowledge can be compared to systems of place-naming in other indigenous communities. Although Hopi has been the subject of substantial ethnographic research over the last 125 years, there has been relatively little work that documents the morphology, phonology, etymology, meaning, and use of toponyms. The information documented by this project will provide significant linguistic and anthropological information about Hopi cultural transmission, moral instruction, and symbolic links between cultural landscapes and identity. This information is important for understanding the development of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Documenting place names will also provide important information for future use in tribal language preservation programs and reservation curriculum development, thus helping to disseminate Hopi linguistic and cultural knowledge among Hopi youth. Preserving knowledge about Hopi place names will increase public understanding of Hopi history as it relates to the geography of the Southwest.