Documenting Naturally Occurring Ute

FAIN: FN-50096-11

Stacey Oberly
Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)

The main goal of this project is to document the Southern Ute language, a highly endangered language spoken in Colorado. During this project, PI, who is a Southern Ute tribal member and a linguist, will record fifteen hours of high-quality digital audio and video recordings of naturally occurring speech and personal narratives in this moribund Uto-Aztecan language. Although there are 1,419 enrolled members of the Southern Ute tribe, there are only forty remaining speakers who are all over the age of sixty. The naturally occurring speech and personal narratives will be collected by interviewing several Southern Ute speakers. This will greatly expand the knowledge and understanding of this syntactically and morphologically interesting language. Specifically, the audio and video data collection will be translated, transcribed, annotated, entered into an electronic database, archived and disseminated to the community. (Edited by staff)