Projekt

The Beaver language documentation project is a collaborative research effort by an international and interdisciplinary team. The work is also closely coordinated with the First Nations that belong to the Beaver people in Canada. Beaver is a highly endangered language that is still spoken in several communities. Speaker age ranges from older than 45 to older than 70. Besides aspiring to a good multimedia documentation and basic description 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. 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. The extension period will allow to proceed with the transcription of the recordings to gather grammatical information to complement the corpus data in order to make it more accessible for typological and linguistic research and to finish two doctoral theses that cover new ground in the phonetic, phonological and prosodic description of this polysynthetic tonal language.

• Dr. Dagmar Jung

  Universität Köln
  Philosophische Fakultät
  Institut für Linguistik
  Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Köln