An exploration of historical Alutiiq language texts

Abstract

For the past five years, the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository has been documenting intricacies of the Alutiiq language with the help of Elder speakers and a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1360839). The project’s primary focus has been recording vocabulary, grammar, and ways of speaking for this threatened Native Alaskan language. However, historical texts also offer insight into Alutiiq speech. In the late 1700s, foreigners began writing words and phrases in Alutiiq, creating rare records of the language as spoken in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Staff members have been searching archival texts for archaic Alutiiq vocabulary to bring awareness of it to community members. Archives in Berkeley, California; Washington, DC; and St. Petersburg, Russia, have provided valuable linguistic information for addition to the corpus of Alutiiq language documentation. The project is breathing new life into ancestral vocabulary by sharing it with the last generation of first-language Alutiiq speakers for pronunciation and interpretation. It is also allowing students of Alutiiq to learn aspects of the language that have not been used in living memory.