Author Archives: Gretchen

About Gretchen

Gretchen is a second year PhD student at McGill. She's been working on preverbs and on indefinite pronouns in Mi'gmaq, and is also interested in how to use tech tools for language documentation/revitalization.

Foundation for Endangered Languages meeting

Posted on by
Reply

Today is the middle of the Foundation for Endangered Languages annual conference at Carleton University in Ottawa. I (Gretchen) and Elise are here already and we’ve met up with a few people (hi Hilary!) and we’ll be joined by Jessica and Hisako today. We’ve heard some great talks so far: you can see the program of events here.

This afternoon is an electronic poster presentation on Using Technology to Bridge the Gap Between Speakers, Learners, and Linguists, which will about LingSync and the LingSync Spreadsheet app, by Elise, Erin, Carol, Hisako, Alan, Jessica, and Gina, representing McGill, Concordia, and iLanguage Lab.

I (Gretchen) and a few other people are livetweeting on the hashtag #FEL2013, if you want to follow along.

Carol, Elise, and Mali-Beth present at L’nui’sultinej

Posted on by
Reply

Carol, Elise, and Mali-Beth are presenting today at L’nui’sultinej in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, a conference about Mi’gmaq language education.

Their presentation is called “Student Perspectives on Mi’gmaw Language-Learning through Multi-Modal Teaching: A community-linguistics partnership” and is based on their experiences learning the language and documenting the language course in summer 2012. You can download their slides on the Research page.

Anishnaabemowin Circle Learning Guide

Posted on by
Reply

I just came across this Learning Guide for Anishinaabemowin, which is a community-driven reference book about the language created by Maya Chacaby with Alex McKay and Keren Rice.

The Kikinowaawiiyemon, or Language teaching circle guide, was created after several years of research and consultation. Key to its development was the overwhelming demand by language learners and community organizations for Anishinaabe-based language teaching tools. In essence, the Kikinowaawiiyemon is a grammar structured around Anishinaabe worldview. (pg. 17)

It has some very accessible explanations about the structure of the language, balancing traditional/cultural ways of knowing with a minimum of linguistics terminology. Some examples are the explanations of animacy (pg. 19-20 using Anishinaabe terms rather than animate and inanimate), person (pg. 24 the diagrams for 1st/2nd/3rd persons), and transitivity (pg. 28). Not all of their explanations would work for Mi’gmaq (for example the Eastern/Western hemisphere distinction between Independent and Conjunct doesn’t happen the same way, pg. 27), but I thought the examples might be interesting or useful to anyone working on grammar lessons or on the wiki.

While writing this post, I also came across another paper by Maya Chacaby “A Report on Best Practice Models for Tertiary Indigenous Language Learning” which also looks very interesting.

Wiki update

Posted on by
Reply

The wiki has grown a lot since we first started it in March. There are currently 41 articles, including several overview pages (Main Page, Background, Verbs, Nouns) and several style pages (Style Guide, Glosses, How to do Citations, Wiki Gloss Extension) and many other pages that describe various aspects of the language. Thanks to everyone for your hard work on this so far!

A few summary page links that might be useful to editors/contributors: List of All Existing Pages, List of Most-Wanted Pages, Recent Changes.

But it doesn’t end here! Some of these existing pages need to have more content into them, and we have many ideas for other pages. Here’s a preliminary list — let us know in the comments if you have more ideas or can volunteer to write one of these.

  • Expanding the VAI, VII, VTA, VTI pages
  • Expanding “Pronouns” and “Questions”
  • Mood
  • Pronunciation Differences (between Mi’gmaq and English)
  • Schwa
  • Word Order
  • Dialect Differences (varieties of Mi’gmaq)
  • Medials, Finals
  • Prepositions
  • Adjectives/modification

This is also a reminder to everyone to check out the wiki and feel free to edit typos, sentence phrasing, explanations, make new pages, or anything else. If you don’t have an account already, you’ll need to ask me (Gretchen) or Mike to set one up for you, but this is not difficult and we are happy to do so.

Returning from the Algonquian Conference

Image

Reply

We were well-represented at the 44th Algonquian Conference in Chicago this weekend, with a group talk by Carol, Sarah, Mary-Beth and Elise about the summer Mi’gmaq language course, in addition to individual linguistics talks by Mike, Elise, Gretchen, Erin, and Conor. For more details on the individual talks, check out the Research page, which already has abstracts but will hopefully have handouts soon.

It was a great trip and we met a lot of people. Here are some pictures!

Update 2 from CoLang

Posted on by
Reply

In the second week of CoLang, I took courses on Archives/Databases, Strategies to Reintroduce Languages, Pedagogical Grammars, and Internet/Multimedia.

Archives/Databases: In this course, we learned how to use SQL and OpenOffice Base to make databases, which are basically like inter-connected spreadsheets where the information can be presented in a variety of different ways. If anyone is interested in learning how to do any of this, there are very detailed slides available for the first and second weeks of this course.

Strategies: This was a class about using archived and written material for language teaching, particularly for languages without many fluent speakers anymore. We talked about a variety of sources for language learning materials and things you can do with them. Some things that other language communities have done include an iphone app for learning Yati, Wunderkammer, a project for making spelling dictionaries on mobile phones (so you can text in a language more easily), a list of lesson plans for language-learning in general, and some audio/video lessons that have been made in Mohegan. Other ideas are playing games like I Spy and Simon Says, and the “Where are my keys?” game that I posted about earlier.

Pedagogical Grammars: This class looked at lots of different types of grammars and discussed what makes a grammar effective for teaching (syllabus here). SpokenCree.org is a website with audio Cree lessons that goes with a series of textbooks on the Cree language. A great quote from Jacob Manitowa-Bailey, who has done a lot of work with the Sauk Master-Apprentice program:

“Concrete, contextualized, varied, modern, and repeated sentence length examples are better than charts, explanations, or isolated examples in longer narratives.” -Jacob Manatowa-Bailey

Internet/Multimedia: In this class, we discussed a variety of ways to use Internet resources to promote and use language. A few examples of interesting things we were shown: Indigenous Tweets, which lists people who tweet in indigenous languages. Navajo Word of the Day, a website (also on Facebook and Twitter) that gives a new Navajo word each day. We also learned how to put QR codes on posters to send people to a website on their smartphone. I have a demo of this that I can show if anyone’s interested but I don’t think I want to put it up online at the moment.

Videos of language-learning games

Posted on by
2

“Where Are Your Keys?” is a language game that I just found out about at CoLang. The game is played with several simple objects, such as a red stone, a white stone, a red stick, and a white stick. The players then repeat several phrases about these objects (such as, “what’s that?” and “I want the red stick”) while pointing and passing them around. The phrases are repeated many times with different variations by the players, so the people I was talking to said that they found it was a great way of getting people comfortable talking. This is a video of Mohegan language learners playing the game.

Another example of things that other people are doing with video is Katie Grant, a participant in the Sauk Master-Apprentice program who is making youtube videos about things she is learning in the Sauk language.

Update 1 from CoLang

Posted on by
Reply

Hello from Kansas everyone! I’ve been here for just over a week now at CoLang, a six-week institute on Collaborative Language research on endangered languages. I’m really excited to be here and I’ve been learning a lot in all my courses and meeting a lot of great people. The courses I took last week were XML, Lexicography, FLEx, and Grantwriting. I’m going to give a short summary of some useful things from each below. If anyone is interested in learning more about a particular topic, just let me know and I can send you notes or links!

XML: This is a formatting language that allows you to mark parts of a text as having a certain relationship to each other. You can mark the text directly, or use various programs that create this type of markup (like FLEx, see below) or format it into a particular type of output (like only the sentences in one language, or a comparison table, or a webpage, using tools like XSLT).

Lexicography: This class was all about making dictionaries. Although there are several Mi’gmaq dictionaries, it was still useful to learn about some of the decisions that dictionary-creators make and the software that can be used to do that, particularly since some of these can also be used to organize language data more generally. There’s a great list of pros and cons of various software programs in one of the presentations from the class.

FLEx: This is one popular database program that many linguists use or are familiar with. We learned how to import and backup data, how to do glossing, editing the lexicon, categorizing and linking terms with each other, and doing statistics on how many times a word occurs and in what contexts. I feel like at this point I probably know enough that I could figure out basically anything else I want to do by clicking around or reading help documents.

Grantwriting: This class was taught by two profs who were experienced in applying for grants and reviewing other people’s grants. We learned about different granting agencies and got to see some examples of both accepted and rejected grants and reviews. The most important things that they identified in grantwriting are: having a good idea, being believable that you will accomplish it, and doing so in an ethical manner (more detailed notes about how to do this that I’ll pull out in grantwriting season). Although we’ve applied to SSHRC before, there were also a few international granting agencies that I wasn’t already aware of, such as the Endangered Language Fund and the Endangered Languages Project, so these might be other things to consider at some point.

In week 2 I’m taking Archives/Databases, Strategies to Reintroduce Languages, Pedagogical Grammar, and Internet/Multimedia, which are also going well, so I’ll give a summary of those next week!

Endangered Languages Project

Posted on by
2

Interesting new project from Google: a website for information in and about endangered languages. Description from their main page, at www.endangeredlanguages.com:

The Endangered Languages Project, is an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat. (Source)

More details on the project at the Google blog press release and an FAQ on sources for the information. People here at CoLang with me seem pretty interested by this, and a few of the people here are already involved.

I just checked out the entry for Mi’gmaq, and it’s pretty incomplete. For example, only one location is listed where the language is spoken, around Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, the primary spelling is listed as Micmac, and the primary classification is listed as Algic. There are three Youtube videos linked, but no other materials in the language.

However, people and organizations are encouraged to sign up and add more to the entries. On the one hand, getting involved could correct some of this information and make more resources available. On the other hand, it would be extra work for us, and we’re already making materials available online. At minimum, maybe we could consider logging in and making some links to Mi’gmaq-language resources that are already online? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Passive Speakers/Fluent Comprehenders/Receptive Bilinguals

Posted on by
Reply

Another of the talks that I found interesting at OWNAL was about people who understand their heritage language but don’t speak it, and talking about some of the reasons why this happens and how to make people feel more comfortable speaking. This is a really common situation for a lot of minority languages, and there are several names that people use for it, including passive speakers, fluent comprehenders, or receptive bilinguals.

One of the suggestions that I remember from the question period is that passive speakers may not feel comfortable speaking around Elders or other fluent speakers because they’re worried about speaking incorrectly, so there are people in one community who have organized small groups of people around the same age and comfort level who get together and talk in their language without anyone else around to get intimidated by.

I also found this very long but interesting article (it does have a table of contents though!) about heritage language learners of Spanish taking Spanish classes and the effects of their attitude towards learning and their identity. It’s not Mi’gmaq or even an Algonquian language, but some of the material is pretty general.