FINDING THE LOCUS OF BEST PRACTICE: TECHNOLOGY TRAINING IN AN ALASKAN

• Main Authors: Language Community, Andrea Berez, Gary Holton
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Athabascan; Dena'ina; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.501.7990; http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/1295/1/8FH2006.pdf

At the time of writing, a three-year language technology project focused on the Dena'ina Athabascan language of Southcentral Alaska is coming to its end. The Dena'ina Archiving, Training, and Access (DATA) project was developed to address three primary concerns: (1) requests by the Dena'ina community for greater access to existing language materials; (2) the need to implement enduring standards of digital language archiving; and (3) the need for intensive training of community members and graduate students in language technology and fieldwork techniques. It is the last of these goals, training, that is the focus of this paper. We discuss our experiences bringing language technology into a small speaker community setting, and reflect on why the results of our training efforts differed from what we expected. It seems that we, as linguists, may initially have been blinded by our 'best practice ideology ' to the unique and personal interests of Dena'ina heritage speakers regarding the place of technology in language revitalisation efforts. Ultimately we found that a true division of labour between linguists and community members may be the best solution in situations of severe language endangerment. Dena'ina is spoken by fewer than 75 people in the Cook Inlet region of Alaska (Figure 1). While several nascent maintenance efforts are underway, English remains the dominant language of the Dena'ina community, and children are no longer acquiring Dena'ina as a first language. However, the current endangerment of the language is in sharp contrast with the depth and breadth of existing documentation: while there is no comprehensive dictionary or grammatical description for the language, Dena'ina is among the better documented of the Northern Athabascan languages. The Alaska