Blackfoot Linguistic Transcription and Discourse Analysis

Mizuki Miyashita, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Montana, recently received a major grant from Humanities Montana to continue a project conducting discourse analysis of the Blackfoot language.

Like many other Native American languages, Blackfoot is critically endangered with only 100 speakers out of 1800 enrolled tribal members in Montana. Furthermore, Blackfoot speakers in the US are almost all 75 years old or older. So, the speed of language loss is rapid, and research efforts are necessary to slow this trend. Although there are some linguistic descriptions of Blackfoot, very few linguists investigate indigenous languages compared to commonly-studied languages, and, as a result, the field does not progress and there are significant gaps in the linguistic documentation. In particular, the published research lacks the analysis of conversation continuations which plays an important role in language revitalization.

Professor Miyashita's project aims to fill gaps in documentation with respect to conversation analysis, and the produced research will contribute to language education in Blackfoot. Discourse analysis contributes to finding important linguistic information for language learning: pragmatics (speech interaction with context), turn taking (conversation development), backchanneling (expression of conversation engagement), sociolects (gender or age influence in speech), and other metalinguistic factors (such as emotion and/or humor). These linguistic factors must be obtained from investigating natural conversation and cannot be found in currently existing documentation.

The project was begun with the support of a Jacobs Research Grant from the Whatcom Museum of History, in Bellingham, Washington. That grant enabled Professor Miyashita to recruit native speakers to take part in the project, and to record approximately eight hours of conversational speech. The Humanities Montana grant is being used for the following tasks:

Transcription—i.e. the process of converting recorded materials into written text. This involves listening to the recordings in small sections and writing down spoken words and phrases. Beside actual Blackfoot phrases, English equivalent expressions are also noted. When a linguist transcribes his or her non-native language, a native speaker’s assistance is a requisite. It is a time-consuming process, and requires listening to the same short exchange 20 times on average. The estimated time to complete a 1-minute-long sound file is about one hour.

Interlinear analysis—i.e. the process of analyzing the words in terms of meaningful parts by labeling these parts by equivalent meaning (i.e. word-by-word translation) and type of grammatical functions (e.g. animate, transitive, theme) based on the transcription. This is an important step before conducting conversation analysis because the structure of Blackfoot is distinct from English, and plain English translation will not fully serve as data. Blackfoot is described as a polysynthetic language—i.e. one word usually consists of multiple meaningful units and often has to be expressed by a full sentence in English. For example, a Blackfoot word nitohkanáóhpommatoo’piaawa meaning “I bought all of them” consists of 6 meaningful parts: nit (involve 1st person), ohkaná (all), óhpommatoo (buy, transitive), ’p (direct theme), i (inanimate plural), and aawa (involve 3rd person). No part of this word can stand in isolation. Also, some words are untranslatable in English without using specialized linguistic terms such as “direct theme” and “inanimate.”

Discourse analysis—i.e. linguistic research that investigates how language functions in natural conversation. Once the interlinear analysis is completed, then a discourse analysis can be made. Various factors can be analyzed in terms of discourse. In the interlinearized transcription, Professor Miyashita plans to look for the following content for analysis: use of humor, turn taking, and expression of conversation engagement. Actual results will depend on the transcription.

Finally, Professor Miyashita plans to offer at least two public talks about her research—one at the Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana, in August, 2010, and another at the University of Montana (time TBD).