Documentation and Analysis of Discourse in Cheyenne, a Native American language

Chief Dull Knife Memorial College, Lame Deer MT

Investigators

Abstract

The indigenous languages of America are a vital national resource. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. However, many of these languages are under-documented and existing documentation can be scattered and difficult to access, hampering language learning efforts and research. This project will address that challenge and will create a digital corpus of analyzed transcriptions and translations of Cheyenne, an endangered Algonquian language for which no publicly available online corpus or database currently exists. The corpus will result in an online, searchable database, hosted at a tribal college. This will make the database available for a wide audience to make new queries, to find resources for language and cultural revitalization by the community, as well as to test the reproducibility and robustness of prior findings on the language. In addition to supporting an indigenous language with the development of a crucial language and cultural resource, this project will increase engagement in the language sciences. The project brings together linguists, students and staff from a tribal college, fluent speakers of Cheyenne, and other members of the Cheyenne community, broadening capacity in the social sciences by training in language documentation and technology as well as linguistic analysis. The project is co-funded by the NSF Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP). This project will make a large corpus of Cheyenne language texts widely accessible and bring home Cheyenne stories that are not currently available to the Cheyenne people. Existing documentation of Cheyenne includes texts dating back at least to the 1940s, but there is currently no single repository for this documentation. This project proposes to collect together existing Cheyenne texts from published materials and archives into an online, searchable, audio-enhanced database, hosted at Chief Dull Knife College (CDKC), the tribal college of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. The project will also increase the coverage of existing documentation by investigating subtle semantic and pragmatic features of Cheyenne discourse, including sentential connectives, discourse particles, and obviation, which have never been studied in detail before. These important features of Cheyenne discourse are rapidly being lost and studying them from a semantic and pragmatic perspective has the potential to reveal previously undocumented phenomena. This investigation will also advance linguistic science, contributing to our cross-linguistic understanding of these phenomena and bringing data from an understudied language to bear on theories primarily developed for English. All texts will be standardized and linguistically analyzed linked with any existing audio files. Texts will be displayed in a variety of formats for different purposes, including research, language learning, and language material development. Such a database will be useful to Cheyenne language teachers and learners as well as linguists, and it will put in place a structure for the collection and dissemination of future texts and language materials. This project is a collaboration between Chief Dull Knife College and Cornell University.