Documenting the Verbs of Omaha through Narrative

FAIN: FN-50061-09

Ardis R. Eschenberg
Nebraska Indian Community College (Macy, NE 68039-3051)

OmoNhoN, or Omaha, is a member of the Siouan language family. It is spoken mainly on the Omaha Nation reservation in northeastern Nebraska. Currently, there are fewer than forty speakers of OmoNhoN. While language revitalization efforts at the public school, the community college, and various community programs, such as the Omaha Alcohol Program, teach fundamentals of the language to a variety of learners from preschool to the elderly, no one has attained fluency in this manner yet. To document the language, this project proposes to 1) create a database of at least twelve fully transcribed digital and audio recordings of fluent speakers of OmoNhoN on a variety of topics in different genres, and 2) develop a verb book for OmoNhoN which documents the conjugation of at least 500 distinct verbs and provides examples of usage, referring especially to data in the series of twelve narratives. The database, to include transcriptions of the audio recordings in UmoNhoN, morphemic glossing in English, English translations, and speech notation, will be given to Nebraska Indian Community College's UmoNhoN Center of Excellence, the UmoNhoN Nation Public School's language program, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln's anthropology department, and the Endangered Language Fund archive. Availability of the database will be advertised via the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas and the Conference on Endangered Languages and Cultures of North America. (Edited by staff)