American Indian Sign Language Conference 2012 (August 31-September 2 in Browning, Montana)

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This project will organize and coordinate an American Indian Sign Language (AISL) Conference and documentary linguistics workshops in Browning, Montana on the Blackfeet [Amskapi Pikuni] Reservation, August 31 - September 2, 2012. All phases of the Conference will involve collaboration with members of Native American signing communities to document the geographic spread, domains of use, and linguistic status of AISL, currently classified as an endangered language. Sign language linguists, anthropologists, and scholars specializing in documentary linguistic fieldwork will be invited to also participate. Linguistic and anthropology students will assist the project with video recording and photographing presentations, workshops, and main events. The Conference will be widely publicized in academic venues and American Indian communities. A major anticipated DEL research outcome is to identify and involve more individuals who know AISL from Indian nations of the US and Canada. This will be the first occasion since the early 1930s that American Indian signers from different nations will have convened to share their knowledge of history, geography, and culture through signed and spoken language. Following the Conference, the project PI will apply annotation software for linguistic transcription and analysis (e.g. ELAN). Short video clips and image collages will be produced for the public with longer video samples for the AISL community and researchers. The Conference will showcase efforts to document and describe AISL. The workshops will demonstrate the linguistic transcription and translation processes to produce documentary linguistic materials both accessible and analyzable by people unfamiliar with the languages involved. Project outcomes will be integrated into the research website/digital corpus, maintained at the University of Tennessee. This offers dissemination to a broad audience and contributes to AISL preservation, revitalization, and corpus linguistic research. It is anticipated that these findings will advance our knowledge of the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic underpinnings of indigenous sign languages.