新澳门六合彩内幕信息

NSF grant to help 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis preserve rare Hupa native language

About an hour inland from Eureka, in Humboldt County, California, there remains a small group of people who speak Hupa, a critically endangered Native American language. Members of the Hoopa Valley Tribe for many years have been actively engaged in revitalizing their language. Now, their efforts will be supported by , an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

He recently received a $245,000 grant from the National Science Foundation鈥檚 Documenting Endangered Languages program to research and document the language. Spence teaches Native American studies and also is director of the 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis Native American Language Center.

鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to know how many people are still fluent in the language, but it is probably just a handful,鈥 said Spence.

He will work with a collaborator and a Hupa elder to preserve, digitize, narrate and transcribe audio and video archives and make them accessible through a website.

While the grant will aid Spence鈥檚 research, it has much wider implications. Now, recordings and transcribed texts will be available to many people, including scholars, but also to members of the Hoopa Valley Tribe who are trying to bring the language back into everyday use. 

鈥淭heir materials will be useful to linguistic science, but I also hope useful for revitalization projects happening in Hoopa Valley,鈥 Spence said. 鈥淲e want to bridge that gap with this project.鈥

Hupa elder has recordings

Hupa elder Verdena Parker grew up speaking Hupa in Hoopa Valley, home to the Hoopa reservation. She and her mother continued speaking Hupa until her mother鈥檚 death in the late 1990s. Parker had made audio recordings of herself telling traditional Hupa stories, and during the 1950s and early 1960s made silent movies of Hupa dances. Now, Parker鈥檚 stories will be transcribed, and the film footage will be narrated in the Hupa language.

鈥淚 wanted to see these stories preserved for the Hupa people,鈥 Parker said. 鈥淚鈥檝e kept these stories in my head and wanted to share them.鈥

Parker said hers was one of the few families who spoke Hupa exclusively at home. When she was growing up, speaking Native American languages was discouraged, and those who did were seen as backward. As attitudes have changed, more people are interested in reconnecting with their culture and language, but it isn鈥檛 easy.

鈥淪ome of the older people are trying to learn, but Hupa is very difficult,鈥 Parker said. 鈥淭here are classes for preschoolers and they鈥檙e doing well.鈥  

Spence鈥檚 research

Spence鈥檚 research is focused on 鈥渆videntiality,鈥 or grammatical markers that indicate sources of information and viewpoints in the language.

鈥淭he grammar of Hupa is very complicated, but evidentiality is clearly an important part of it,鈥 said Spence, who earned a bachelor鈥檚 degree in French and linguistics from 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis and a doctorate in linguistics from 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Berkeley. 鈥淒etails of the distinctive Hupa are still largely unexplored, but have tremendous potential to improve our general understanding of how such meanings are expressed in human languages.鈥 

Hupa is part of the Athabaskan language family, spoken across North America with concentrations in western Canada and Alaska, the southwestern United States, as well as Northern California and coastal Oregon.

The project is a collaboration among Parker, Spence and Ramon Escamilla, assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Central Arkansas.

All recordings and transcriptions produced by the project will be archived with the .

Media Resources

Karen Nikos-Rose, Research news (emphasis: arts, humanities and social sciences), 530-219-5472, kmnikos@ucdavis.edu

Justin Spence, Native American Studies, 530-754-7173, jspence@ucdavis.edu

Jeffrey Day, College of Letters and Science, 530-219-8258, jaaday@ucdavis.edu

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