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Press Release
May 11, 2005
SHI AWARDED
TLINGIT LANGUAGE GRANT
Sealaska Heritage Institute is one of 26 organizations nationwide to
receive a grant through a new federal program to digitally archive
endangered Native languages.
The $266,000 award from the National Science Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities will advance the institute’s efforts to
revitalize Tlingit, one of the most endangered languages in Southeast
Alaska.
“Tlingit is a highly endangered language,” said SHI President Rosita
Worl, noting roughly 300 speakers remain in Alaska and most of them are
elderly. “Virtually no children are learning Tlingit as a first language
in the home.”
The institute will use the funds over two years to:
· Develop a reference grammar of Tlingit, which will explain the grammar to language learners in as non-technical a way as possible;
· Complete Intermediate Tlingit and Principal Parts (two previously unfunded books in progress). Intermediate Tlingit will complement Beginning Tlingit, a textbook currently used by Tlingit language teachers as well as independent learners. Principal Parts will provide detailed conjugation paradigms for Tlingit verbs; and,
· Digitize a large collection of approximately 40-year-old audio cassette tapes containing Tlingit narrative, oratory and ethnographic information.
The grant is part
of the federal agencies' joint Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL)
project—a new, multi-year effort to digitally archive at-risk languages
before they become extinct. The institute has been on the forefront of
efforts to revitalize the indigenous languages in the region, and in
1997, its Board of Trustees adopted language restoration as the foremost
priority of the Institute.
“This award will advance our efforts to teach Tlingit to school
children,” Worl said. “This is so important because our past work has
shown Native students do better academically when they are exposed to
their Native languages and culture in school.”
The project is eighty percent federally funded and twenty percent is funded through non-governmental sources. Sealaska Heritage Institute is a private, nonprofit founded in 1981 to administer cultural and educational programs for Sealaska Corp. The institute is governed by an all-Native board of trustees. Its mission is to perpetuate and enhance Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures.
CONTACT: Keri Edwards, SHI Linguist; 463-4844