Rochester Review
July–August 2010
Vol. 72, No. 6
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In Review
DOT-TO-DOT: The Rochester team is using geotagging technology to map the locations of communities that include speakers of native Dene languages in northwestern Canada. Represented by yellow dots, the communities participating in the research project will provide examples of sounds used in their languages for an online speech atlas. (Illustration: Steve Boerner)What is the sound of a language that’s no longer spoken? Rochester linguist Joyce McDonough doesn’t want to wait to find out.
Thanks to a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation, she and her research team are developing an online speech atlas of endangered native languages of the Mackenzie River Basin, a vast and sparsely populated region of northwestern Canada.
The goal is to help preserve linguist diversity and help native communities hold onto their languages.
“Language for a community is like a second skin,” says McDonough, an associate professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences. “It’s who they are. It’s their source of identity. And it carries all of their cultural knowledge. This is especially true in minority cultures or oral cultures, where there is no body of knowledge that exists outside the speakers of the language. So when the language disappears, that knowledge disappears.”
The atlas will focus on the sound systems of the Mackenzie Basin’s Athabaskan—or as speakers prefer, Dene—languages. Spoken from Alaska to the Rio Grande, the systems constitute the largest and most geographically widespread language family of native North America.
Envisioned as an online site for sharing information, research, and educational resources between the Canadian Indigenous Language and Literacy Development Institute and the indigenous communities, the site will provide geotagged links to individual Dene-speaking communities. It will also provide examples and descriptions from each community, demonstrating sounds spoken by native speakers.
“Heritage languages are under considerable socioeconomic pressure from the English and French speaking overculture” in northwestern Canada, McDonough says. “Fewer and fewer native North Americans are becoming fluent in their heritage tongues, and those who are fluent or want to learn their languages face increasingly reduced opportunities to speak and learn in their tongue, a situation that undermines the stability of these communities and their cultural knowledge.”
“This Web site,” she says, “can be critical, too, to those interested in preserving linguistic diversity and for helping communities hold on to their native languages before they vanish.”
—Susan Hagen
