Yakima Sahaptin Lexicography

FAIN: HR-50116-04

Virginia Beavert
Heritage College (Toppenish, WA 98948-9562)

Funding is requested for a 9½ month equivalent award for Virginia Beavert, a contract faculty member at Heritage College, Washington. Ms. Beavert is one of the few remaining native speakers of the Yakima dialect of Sahaptin, one of the Northwest dialects of Sahaptin. Ms. Beavert is also fully literate in her native language. The award would allow Ms. Beavert to focus more of her time on the current Yakima Sahaptin dictionary project, a collaboration between Ms. Beavert and Professor Sharon Hargus (University of Washington, Seattle), than she is presently able. The current database/dictionary contains 3,113 lexical entries (words) based on 1,458 headwords. The entries for headwords are based on all letters of the Yakima alphabet; it is not the case that only chapters A-H, for example, have been completed. Ms. Beavert's primary research activities would be to create sentences for more of the entries in the current dictionary, and to review an extensive collection of Northwest Sahaptin texts collected by Melville Jacobs nearly a century ago, identifying additional possible words and sentences for the dictionary. There is currently no published dictionary of any dialect of Sahaptin.