| PD-271355-20 | Preservation and Access: Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation | Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians | Mississippi Choctaw Dictionary and Comparison of Community Dialects | 6/1/2020 - 5/31/2024 | $393,363.00 | De Laura | | Saunders | | | | Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians | Choctaw | MS | 39350-4224 | USA | 2020 | | Documenting Endangered Languages - Preservation | Preservation and Access | 393363 | 0 | 387258 | 0 | The documentation of Choctaw, a Western
Muskogean language spoken primarily in east-central Mississippi by approximately
6,000 people and in southeast Oklahoma by fewer than 500 people. The applicant would
produce a dictionary in print and electronic formats, as well as a collection
of recorded interviews of speakers representing different generations and
community dialects that would be partially transcribed/translated. All
materials would be archived in the MCBI tribal archives and at the American
Philosophical Society.
This project will document modern Choctaw in eight
communities on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (MBCI) reservation, in
order to publish a Mississippi Choctaw dictionary, and to increase the
collection of Choctaw texts from Mississippi. The project has two language
documentation objectives: 1) To create a new dictionary of Choctaw in print and
electronic formats, by checking approximately 5,000 Choctaw dictionary entries
with highly fluent community members and having them audio record each word and
a sample sentence. 2) To audio- and video record 32 hours of conversational
interviews between Choctaw speakers in eight MBCI communities. Sixteen hours of
the recordings will be selected for transcription/translation in the modern
Choctaw orthography. The compilation of video and audio recordings and text
transcriptions/translations collected for the project will be archived in two
locations at the end of each project year: the tribal archives of the
Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians at the Chahta Immi Cultural Center in
Choctaw, Mississippi, and the American Philosophical Society (APS) in
Philadelphia. |