The staff and students in the LDRC are working on a wide variety of projects on languages around the world. Several of these, including past projects, are summarized in the pages on this site.
Totonac Documentation Project
This project is aimed at the documentation of languages in the Totonac branch of the Totonacan language family, spoken in East Central Mexico. It began initially with work on Upper Necaxa Totonac and has since expanded to include intensive work in neighbouring languages, Zuhuateutla Totonac, Coahutilán Totonac, and Tepezintla/Ozomatlán Totonac. The project has conducted more limited field work in several other Totonac communities.- field visits beginning in 1998
- SSHRC funding since 2001
- students involved in fieldwork since 2003
- practical and academic dictionaries
- electronic lexical database with sound files and moprhological analyses
- reference grammar and morphological model
- analyzed texts, paper and audio archives
- L1 acquisition
- historical reconstruction
- language displacement and ideologies
- collection of ethnobotanical materials
- Project director: David Beck
- Researchers: Michelle Garcia-Vega, Devin Moore, Rachel McGraw, Conor Snoek
T. M. Hess Collection
Thom Hess in his office at UVic in 2001 The Thomas Melville Hess Collection consists of documentary materials on the indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest recorded by the eminent linguist Thom Hess have been donated to Special Collections at UofA. It includes extensive audio recordings and field notes on Lushootseed, as well as other Salishan and Wakashan materials. In the course of this project- tapes will be digitized
- typed transcripts will be digitized and paired with recordings
- materials will be analyzed and analyses included with documentary materials
- on-line access will be provided to some materials
- Project director: David Beck
Lushootseed Project
The Salishan language Lushootseed, spoken in the Puget Sound area of Washington State and the Upper Skagit River, has only a handful of fluent elder speakers remaining, yet — thanks largely to the efforts of Thomas M. Hess and his teachers and collaborators — the language has been well documented, though much of the material remains in unpublished or inaccessible form. This project seeks to compile and analyze the exisiting materials. Currently, we are working on:- interlinearized searchable corpus of ca. 5,300 lines created from transcribed material
- XML database of lexical suffixes
- Project director: David Beck
Totonac Ethnobotany
An essential part of language documentation is the recording of traditional ecological knowledge, one of the earliest casualties of language displacement. In June of 2015, we began the collection and determination of plant species listed in the Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary . The web pages on this site represent 249 collections made in the Necaxa Valley, accompanied by ethnobotanical data provided by our consultants, primarily Longino Barragán Sampayo (Ch.), Porfirio Sampayo Macín (Pt.), and Marcelo Mendoza Orega (Pt.). Photography by Jonathan Amith and Jaime Canek Ledesma. Determinations courtesy Jonathan Amith.
- Project director: David Beck