Projekt

Beaver is a highly endangered language that is still spoken in several communities in two Western Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Alberta. Speaker age ranges from older than 45 to older than 70 in other communities. Besides trying to provide a good basic documentation of the hitherto undescribed language, the project follows an integrational approach: the central topic concerns the personal, historical, and mythical conceptualization of places and placenames. The ethnographic as well as the linguistic discovery processes relate to this topic and proceed from there to further analysis. Ethnographically these types of narratives tell of traditional hunter-gatherer patterns of subsistence and land use, linguistically the texts provide a wealth of spatial terms that are almost unique to the verb morphology of Athabaskan languages. In the extension period the project aims to proceed with the transcription of the recordings: priority is given to the video recordings relating to place and the prophet tradition, since the knowledge of these will be otherwise lost. Additionally more recordings will be made that will embellish and supplement the present corpus to cover more areas of language use.

• Dr. Dagmar Jung

  Universität Köln
  Philosophische Fakultät
  Institut für Linguistik
  Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Köln