Collaborative Research: The COLRC 2.0: A Coeur d’Alene Grassroots Community-Based Digital Documentation and Preservation Project

FAIN: PD-260981-18

Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN 47907-2040)
Shannon T Bischoff (Project Director: September 2017 to present)

Technical enhancements and ingest of additional language resources to the digital repository, Coeur d’Alene Online Language Resource Center, for Coeur d’Alene, an endangered language of the Salish family, spoken in northern Idaho by a few native speakers and an increasing number of second-language learners.  The project would include training for tribal members and others in the development and maintenance of language resources.  

Coeur d'Alene (ISO 639-3-crd/Salish USA, henceforth CRD) is a polysynthetic Salish language. Ethnologue classifies CRD as nearly extinct, with a small number of elderly speakers. The Tribe has had an active language revival program for more than twenty years, and there is a vibrant community of 12 learners who have developed fluency and grammatical knowledge of the language. They draw heavily on documentation of CRD, as it is made accessible in a variety of ways - including by the Coeur d'Alene Online Language Resource Center (henceforth COLRC, http://lasrv01.ipfw.edu/COLRC), which was developed and completed under NSF DEL as a collaborative grant (BCS1160394-BCS1160627) in 2012- 2016. The proposed project is to extend the reach of the COLRC to include (1) technical improvements to allow for real-time editing by Tribal Language Programs personnel, to ensure stable and reliable performance, and to include a large number of newly identified resources, resource views customized by user role, and a new section for pedagogical resources developed and (2), In collaboration with the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), to develop and offer a series of three workshops at Coeur d'Alene Tribal Offices for Coeur d'Alene Tribal members, neighboring Tribes, and interested others to advance their skills in using resources such as the COLRC in language pedagogy, and in the skills needed to take on digital language resource development projects such as the COLRC in their own communities.

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