Dr Inge Genee, Department of Modern Languages, University of Lethbridge, Canada

‘What’s in a preposition?’ Working on, in, with and for a Canadian First Nations language and its speakers

Lecture

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Abstract

In this talk I will reflect on some of the things I have learned through my work with speakers of the Blackfoot language in Southern Alberta, Canada. The training I had received as an MA and PhD student had not prepared me for linguistic fieldwork, since my doctoral dissertation (Genee 1998) was on medieval Irish, a language that obviously doesn’t have any present-day speakers. So when circumstances brought me to a small prairie town in western Canada and I decided to “switch languages” and study the local indigenous language instead of continuing work on Old and Middle Irish, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had to learn on the go, through trial and error, about what it takes to get the data that would form the basis of my theoretical and descriptive work.

I will discuss what I learned about the many layers of research ethics approval processes, community attitudes towards linguists, and Canadian sensitivities around past and present treatment of indigenous communities and individuals. I will also discuss practical issues around working with speakers with varying levels of formal education, literacy, and fluency, and the importance of collecting a wide variety of different types of data. Finally, I will discuss how my initially quite euro-centric work on the Blackfoot language (e.g. Genee 2009, 2013) developed into more collaborative work with (Russell et al. 2012) and for Blackfoot speakers (Genee & Stigter 2009; Heavy Shields Russell & Genee 2014) and is continuing to develop into work in and for the community. I will end by introducing a new SSHRC-funded project aimed at creating a user-friendly digital dictionary for the Blackfoot language to assist in language revitalization efforts.

References

Genee, Inge. 2013. On the representation of roots, stems and finals in Blackfoot. In Casebook in Functional Discourse Grammar. Ed. J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Hella Olbertz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 95-123.

Genee, Inge. 2009. ‘What’s in a morpheme?’ Obviation morphology in Blackfoot. Linguistics 74.4: 913-944.

Genee, Inge. 1998. Sentential complementation in a functional grammar of Irish. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.

Genee, Inge & Shelley Stigter. 2009. Not just “broken English”: Some grammatical characteristics of Blackfoot English. Canadian Journal of Native Education 32: 62-82.

Heavy Shields Russell, Lena & Inge Genee. 2014. Ákaitsinikssiistsi / Blackfoot Stories of Old. Regina: First Nations University of Canada and University of Regina Press (First Nations Language Readers Memoir 3).

Russell, Lena, Inge Genee, Eva van Lier & Fernando Zúñiga. 2012. Referential hierarchies in three-participant constructions in Blackfoot: The effects of animacy, person, and specificity. Linguistic Discovery 10.3: 55-79.

Published by  ACLC