The Yurok Language: Description and Revitalization

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Yurok is an endangered language of northwestern California with no more than a dozen fluent speakers, and possibly as few as five or six, all of them elders. The language is known to linguists via the 1951 grammar by R. H. Robins and a dozen or so other publications, but the majority of past work on Yurok remains unpublished, in the form of fieldnotes and recordings of linguists from the early 20th century (mostly archived at Berkeley). The goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive grammatical description of Yurok while at the same time contributing to the Yurok Tribe's language revitalization project. Data collection and consolidation will involve two primary components over the duration of the grant: fieldwork with the remaining speakers of the language to record as much grammatical, lexical, and text material as possible; and archival work on the unpublished fieldnotes and accompanying recordings of Kroeber and Haas, as well as the fieldnotes of Sapir and others. From this enriched and consolidated database three main publications are envisaged: a teaching grammar of Yurok for use by language teachers and learners in the schools; a Yurok-English/English-Yurok dictionary for use by Yurok speakers and language learners; and a more complete reference grammar which includes information on the sound structure, word structure, sentence structure, dialect differences, speech styles, and the history of the language.