Collaborative Research: Comprehensive Itelmen [itl] Dictionary

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Under this international collaborative project, Jonathan Bobaljik, David Koester, Michael Krauss and Chikako Ono (Chiba University, Japan) will work towards the completion and publication of a comprehensive dictionary of the Itelmen language, comprising all known lexical resources, work that was begun under the aegis of a 2012 RAPID award (ARC-1155973). The centerpiece of the project is the large lexical card file (12,000 + cards) assembled by A. P. Volodin (St. Petersburg) from 1962 into the 1980s. The project is coordinated with a larger effort to publish comprehensive dictionaries of the languages of "Beringia" (the Bering Sea region), and comes at a key juncture in the language's history. Itelmen is critically endangered: at this time, the number of native speakers has dwindled to fewer than 10. At the same time, there is growing interest in the Itelmen language within the Itelmen community, as well as growing scholarly attention to the languages of this region in the context of language contact across the Bering Strait.