The Coeur d’Alene Online Language Resource Center: A grassroots digital resource
For presentation as a paper at the DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference
Shannon Bischoff, Indiana Purdue
Ivy Doak, University of North Texas
Amy Fountain, University of Arizona
John Ivens, University of Arizona
Audra Vincent, Coeur d’Alene Tribe
The Coeur d’Alene Online Language Resource Center (COLRC) is a comprehensive data
resource for the Coeur d’Alene (Interior Salish) language community and scholars. The COLRC
was created and is maintained by the collaborative efforts of community members, linguists, and
computer engineers working to make Coeur d’Alene resources widely available following TAPS
(Target, Access, Preservation, Sustainability) guidelines presented in Chang (2010). Presently,
the Tribal Language Program provides language courses at various levels and for various ages.
The COLRC was created to support the Tribal Language Program and make a number of
language resources readily accessible online as the Tribal government has developed community
wide broadband.
The COLRC includes a searchable root dictionary, affix list, and stem-list; all of these are
based on published material (Lyon and Greene-Wood 2007; Reichard 1938, 1939) and are used
by permission or the copyright has expired (all reference resources are available in two modern
orthographies). The COLRC also houses audio recordings; 1,200+ pages of unpublished
fieldnotes and typed manuscripts (some forty-eight myths and tales in Coeur d’Alene/English);
images of original resources; and links to resources housed at various digital archives.
Coeur d’Alene is a morphologically complex language, and the COLRC’s searchable online
root, stem, and affix list make access to the complex morphology easy for language learners and
scholars. The COLRC allows simultaneous access to fieldnotes, edited manuscripts, and
published English translations (Reichard 1947) of stories collected in the late 1920s, as well as
native-speaker recitations of a number of these tales. These resources provide users with
examples of connected speech not otherwise available; a record of changes in the interpretation
of the texts at various stages of analysis; and valuable cultural information.
We present the resources mentioned above, and discuss issues that arose during the
construction of the COLRC. For example, Coeur d’Alene has been recorded in three distinct
orthographies: older Boasian phonetic transcription; modern variations on APA-based
phonological orthography; and the community orthography adopted by the tribe and designed for
use on a typewriter. In an effort to maintain fidelity, all original sources are included in the
COLRC where possible. Where older orthographies have been updated, the process of systematic
change is documented in the COLRC. Advances in phonological and morphological
understanding of Coeur d’Alene are reflected by inclusion of alternative analyses of published
data. In short, we believe the COLRC can serve as an example of grassroots digital language
resources following best practices.
References
Chang, Debbie. 2010. TAPS: Checklist for Responsible Archiving of Digital Language
Resources. MA thesis Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.
Lyon, John, and Rebecca Greene-Wood, eds. 2007. Lawrence Nicodemus’s Coeur d’Alene
Dictionary in Root Format. UMOPL 20.
Reichard, Gladys. 1938. Coeur d'Alene. In Handbook of American Indian Languages 3, ed.
Franz Boas. New York: J. J. Augustin.
Reichard, Gladys. 1939. Stem-list of the Coeur d'Alene language. IJAL 10:92-108.
Reichard, Gladys. 1947. An Analysis of Coeur d’Alene Indian Myths. With a comparison by
Adele Froelich. Philadelphia: Memoirs of the American Folk-lore Society, v. 41.