AKOSTINIICH KOWASSAATI / UNDERSTANDING KOASATI (CKU)

Mcneese State University

Investigators

Abstract

Koasati is an endangered language with 200 speakers. This project is a collaborative endeavor among The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, an anthropologist at McNeese University, and linguists at The College of William and Mary and UC Santa Barbara to conduct the first phonetic study of Koasati. The data will be gathered over two years and will consist of analyses of scripted surveys of fluent speakers and conversational data. In order to maintain existing community support, the project will also seek to expand an existing audio dictionary of 1,200 words and to assist and train tribal members in lexicography, ethno-botany, and language documentation. The intellectual merit of the proposal lies in providing basic, quantified data regarding Koasati consonants and vowels, the pitch accent system in nouns, the grammatical system of tone in verbs, as well as phrasal and sentence-level prosody. These aspects of Koasati are not well described, and the researchers' pilot studies suggest important differences between Koasati and both Creek and Chickasaw. These findings will contribute to knowledge of sound patterns in Koasati, Muskogean languages, North American languages, and language in general. The multimedia dictionary will provide a lasting record of the pronunciation of words. The project will have a broader impact in training tribal members in language documentation, in training graduate and undergraduate students in instrumental phonetics, and in providing a model within linguistics of collaborative, interdisciplinary, community-based research.