About the project
History
The idea for this project grew out of our experience learning Tanacross language in both informal and classroom settings. While it was possible to record speakers and listen to recordings outside of class time, we found the recordings to be a poor substitute for actually watching the speaker’s pronunciation in class. Difficult sequences of sounds such as xgh or tn were clearly recognizable in class but difficult to hear on an audio recording. We found video recordings to be a much better alternative. We thus set out to obtain high quality video recordings of careful pronunciations of all of the Tanacross sounds.
Rick Thoman developed a grant proposal to the Endangered Language Fund as part of a class entitled Community Language Documentation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Spring 2003. With this funding he was able to compensate speakers for their time working on the project. The video recording was done by Eric Chaikin, as part of the Tanacross Film Project. Chaikin was supported in part by the National Science Foundation EPSCoR program. Without his dedication and expertise, this project would not have been possible.
This site includes approximately 60 separate audio clips and 275 different video files. Audio recordings were recorded directly to computer, then compressed to mp3 format. Video recordings were made using a Sony HD-700 high-definition digital video camera. These recordings were transferred to computer and saved as Quicktime format using Sorenson compression. While the audio recordings were collected over a period of several years, the video recordings were made during a relatively short period in 2007.
Funding for this project was provided by the Endangered Language Fund. Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation through grant NSF-OPP 0136113. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the compilers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This version
While the original CD-ROM continues to be available from the Alaska Native Language, the Sounds of Tanacross had not been available online for several years. The current site was recoded from the original CD-ROM files in February 2023 by Gary Holton. Video files were converted to mp4 H.265 encoding, and HTML files were rewritten using Jekyll and Github Pages. Some efforts were made to transliterate Tanacross forms into Unicode text; however, the majority of the Tanacross examples are still displayed as image files, reflecting an initial attempt to avoid font incompatibilities. The repository is available on Github.
Limitations
The audio and video clips assembled here are intended to illustrate the sounds and sound combinations of the Tanacross language. We hope that this will help people learn to speak Tanacross. Just as no two speakers of English have exactly the same pronunciation, so it is that no two speakers of Tanacross pronounce all words in exactly the same way. Even a single speaker may pronounce words differently according to context or occasion. The recordings found here represent a brief snapshot of speech and are intended only to serve as a guide to pronunciation.
The English translations for the Tanacross words and phrases are meant to be suggestive. Many Tanacross words can be translated with multiple English words. Only one potential translation is provided in the examples.
About the authors
Three speakers contributed audio and video recordings for this project: Mrs. Irene Arnold, Mrs. Laura Sanford, and Mr. Kenny Thomas, Sr.
- Irene Solomon Arnold has devoted much of the past three decades to the teaching and documentation of her ancestral language, producing a number of publications, including Tanacross Language Lessons (1994) and Tanacross Phrase and Conversation Lessons (2003). She have served as Tanacross Language Specialist at the Alaska Native Language Center.
- Laura Sanford (b. 1928, d. 2010) was an active contributor to language revitalization and language documentation programs, participating in the Tanana Chiefs Conference Mentor-Apprentice program and the Tanacross Dictionary Project.
- Kenneth Thomas Sr. (b. 1922, d. 2013) participated in a number of language and culture revitalization projects and completed (with Craig Mishler) an oral history entitled Crow is My Boss (2005). Mr. Thomas
- Eric Chaikin completed a University of Montana M.F.A. project, K’a nech’oxdekdiigh – I’m not going to teach you, an experiential film which tells the story of the Tanacross language and its role in the community.
- Rick Thoman received his M.A. in Linguistics and Alaska Native Languages from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2004 for his work on the Tanacross Learner’s Dictionary.
- Gary Holton was Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, when this CD-ROM was produced. He is now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.