Kawaiisu Conversations and Landscapes: Digital Documentation, Access, and Archiving

Kawaiisu Language And Cultural Center, Tehachapi CA

Investigators

Abstract

Kawaiisu is a critically-endangered Uto-Aztecan language of the Kawaiisu people of California; there are five remaining native speakers, three have been actively engaged in documentation and revitalization projects. Prior documentation of Kawaiisu has typically focused on lexical items and a basic grammatical description of the language. The major gap in the documentation is well-annotated text material, especially natural conversational and narrative data that would shed light on Kawaiisu usage and discourse structure. Moreover, with the exception of a few short videos produced by the Kawaiisu Language and Culture Center, there is essentially no corpus of video footage for Kawaiisu that would facilitate the study of topics such as the co-timing of speech and gestures. This is a critical issue, given the important of such exemplars for language acquisition and for the development and maintenance of a vital linguistic community; it is also time-sensitive, as the development of such a corpus relies on the involvement of the language's elder speakers. This project seeks to remedy this lack, and has four main goals. 1. Working with the elder speakers, create a minimum of 54 hours of audiovisual recordings of conversational and narrative Kawaiisu; 2. Train teams of transcriptionists including community members and linguists in best practices in transcribing, glossing, and translating Kawaiisu. This work will build on the previous successes community members of the project team have had in learning to read and write Kawaiisu using the practical orthography of the Kawaiisu language; 3. Produce high-quality transcriptions, glosses, and translations of a selection of the collected recordings. As the elders have expressed a desire to develop a set of narratives focused on events and places in the Kawaiisu homeland, texts with this focus will be given priority in the project; 4. Add 500 new entries with example sentences to the existing dictionary. This project will assist the Kawaiisu, and other speech communities, in their goal to have second language learners achieve higher degree of fluency in their language and create study resources for generations to come. The project results, training program, and use of digital technologies can be duplicated by other native communities with endangered languages.