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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 9/26/07 |
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In
the News Archive - Year:
April 15, 2007 Talking online dictionary helps keep Oneida language alive Database designed to help with pronunciation By Malavika Jagannathan
It's a battle for which language teachers have one more weapon, thanks to a Web site created by University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor Clifford Abbott with tribal elder Maria Hinton.
They're transforming a printed dictionary into a searchable online database that includes sound samples to help those learning the Oneida language.
"We decided what we really needed was sound," Abbott said. "It's easy to look up a word, but to know what it should sound like is another story."
A language historically steeped in oral tradition, Oneida has been in the written form for only the past few generations. Like other Native American languages, the danger of extinction has catalyzed preservation efforts. Today, students at Oneida Nation schools learn to speak and write it.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 553 speakers of Oneida — 429 of them in Wisconsin.
Still, only about a dozen fluent native speakers remain, including Hinton, who at 96 is one of the oldest.
In the year and a half they've worked together, she and Abbott have put about 4,000 words online — including about 900 sound samples of pronunciation. For now, only the English-to-Oneida part of the database is available.
They're about a quarter of the way through the heavy printed dictionary, but the Web site already is being used as a basis for a grammar class Abbott teaches at the university. The site includes texts on grammar and will one day have sample stories in Oneida.
In the fight for cultural preservation, language is key.
"Culture and language goes together," said Hinton, who learned the language from her grandparents as a child and started speaking English when she was 7.
The endurance of the language keeps more than the spoken word alive. It transmits generations of stories, history and faith, Hinton said.
The complexity of the Oneida language isn't easy to translate, especially online. One of the first challenges in putting the dictionary on the Web was how to transliterate the non-English characters used in Oneida words so that all users could see them without downloading a special font.
Then there's the intricacy of the language itself, which unlike most European language has a system of roots, prefixes and suffixes that is adapted to create new word meanings.
"A single Oneida verb can be as long as an English sentence," said Abbott, a professor of communication and First Nation studies who started studying the Oneida language as a graduate student. "Purely from the written language, it seems real complicated. But most adults need that writing component to learn the language."
It could be a few more years before the online dictionary is complete, but even then, the capacity to add to and improve it is endless, Abbott said.
About the Oneida language
English to Oneida
On the Net
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