The Dene Speech Altas Seeds for the Future
Mackenzie River Basin.
The Dene Speech Altas is an online reousource providing baseline information on the phonetic and prosodic systems of the Dene languages. Spoken language is primary; this is especially significant in oral communities. This project aims to provide a documentation of the speech of a community, what the language sounds like, what the sounds are, how they are produced and organized, in order to construct a good description of the sounds of the individual languages, as seeds for the futuThe goal is to provide documentation of the speech of the Dene langauge communities, in order to provide a basis for the description of the sounds of the individual languages to aid in the further documentation of the langauges spoken in the Dene communities, and to provide tool for education and learning.
The collection of the sound files was done primarily in conjunction and in consultation with the participants at CILLDI (Canadian Indigenous Language Institute) at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. The first data collection began in 2004, and continued through 2011. The project is ongoing.
The DSA is a work in progress. We are still in the process of transcribing, annotating and making available the data we have collected.
Online at: The Dene Speech Atlas
The DSA was funded by the NSF DEL (#7064974). The NSF not responsible for content.