Unangam Tunuu (Aleut language) Conversation Corpus

Language	Unangam Tunuu (Aleut language)
Depositor	Alice Taff
Affiliation	University of Alaska Southeast
Location	United States
Collection ID	0027
Grant ID	IPF0013
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/ba0cd7d1-5180-493e-b940-8f55c5cd64dc

 

Summary of the collection

This collection consists of audio and video recordings of speakers of Unangam Tunuu (Aleut language), spoken on the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands, Alaska, resulting from fieldwork conducted between November 2003 and March 2006. The principal genre is spontaneous conversation between fluent speakers.

 

Group represented

The group represented in this collection are the Indigenous Unangax̂ (Aleut) people of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands, USA. In this community Aleut is primarily spoken among elders. Aleut is also spoken and sung in Aleut community Orthodox Church services when possible. In mass communication a word or 2 of Aleut is occasionally used in newsletters circulated among the language community.

 

Language information

Unangam Tunuu, also known as Aleut, Unangan, Unangas, and Unangax^, is a branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. All Aleuts speak English and most speakers are not literate in Aleut. Aleut is viewed by its speakers as a distinct language with 2 extant dialects, Eastern and Western

Aleut has been a written language since the 1780s when a Cyrillic orthography was developed by the Russian priest Joann Veniaminov specifically for Aleut. Ecclesiastical texts were written and published in Aleut. Aleuts learned to read and write using this system. They kept journals and wrote letters in their language. After the US purchase of Alaska from Russia in the 1860s, US agents, in an effort to ‘derussianize’ the region, destroyed Cyrillic texts, both Russian and Aleut. Religious Aleut Cyrillic texts do survive and are used in services by readers and choir members to this day. In the 1970s a Roman-based orthography was developed specifically for Aleut by the Alaska Native Language Center staff and Dr. Knut Bergsland. This system is the standard today for publication of academic and pedagogical materials. All students who have gone to school in Atka, St. Paul Island, St. George Island or Unalaska schools since the 1980s should be somewhat literate in the Roman Aleut orthography.

 

Special characteristics

This is the sole archived collection of spontaneous conversations among fluent speakers of Unangam Tunuu.

 

Collection contents

The collection comprises around 250 audio and video files, as well as time-aligned transcriptions and English translations of many of the recordings.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Users of any part of the collection should cite the depositor, Alice Taff, as the collector, ELDP as the funder, and the individual speakers, by name, whose words or images are used.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

Taff, Alice. 2010. Unangam Tunuu (Aleut language) Conversation Corpus. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0001-3337-4. Accessed on [insert date here].