Linguistic and Documentation Training for Long Island Algonquian to Support Native American Community Language Researchers

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

The 1990 Native American Languages Act enacted into national policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. Currently, the documentary sources for the indigenous Algonquian languages of Long Island (ALI) and the nearby Southern New England mainland are fragmented and highly challenging, demanding still quite scarce in-depth linguistic expertise to make them of real practical use to scholars and teachers. Collaboratively designed by an indigenous community-member (Unkechaug) Ph.D. researcher, established community language activists, and an experienced Algonquianist linguist, this project will use workshops to make the core tools of Algonquian language analysis and documentation genuinely accessible. Algonquian linguistic structure is notoriously complex, for example, verbs that agree with both subjects and objects (as compared to English, which only displays subject-verb agreement), and further depends on a hierarchy of animacy in subjects and objects in that agreement system. Using a less technical approach, and integrating linguistic research and language revitalization, project activities will develop a richly analyzed and annotated database of ALI materials. Broader impacts include increased participation in the language sciences by Native Americans and support for community language revitalization. Moreover, this research product will be entirely public, supporting work by related Algonquian groups and an existing collaboration with the local K-12 system, even as it sets up the ALI community participants to carry this (and related) research forward as a long-term community effort. This database developed in this award will generate long-term, sustainable linguistic research infrastructure for the participating Unkechaug, Shinnecock, Montaukett, and Mohegan communities. It will also contribute substantially to the infrastructure of general (and Algonquian-specific) linguistic digital documentation and data analysis, and other fields still unable to use current-form ALI materials. Twelve monthly workshops will offer detechnicalized but rigorous training in the relevant essentials of archival and linguistic data-management, phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax/morphosemantics, historical reconstruction, and other relevant linguistic skills for annotating archival documents, all applied as hands-on work developing the preliminary ALI database. Analysis of entry, mid-project, and exit interviews with participants, and of the training presentation and content itself, provides a final set of reports and recommendations regarding the outcomes and overall effectiveness of this researcher training methodology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.