:: the language :: The Beaver language is an endangered First Nation language spoken in British Columbia and Alberta. It is still spoken in six different reserves by some 150 speakers; the youngest of those are in their thirties. Beaver is not acquired by children anymore and the vast majority of the adult speakers are bilingual in Beaver and English. It belongs to a Northern branch of the Athabaskan language family. The Athabaskan languages belong together with Tlingit and Eyak to a larger language family, the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family. The Athabaskan branch is divided into six subgroups: Southern Alaska, Central Alaska-Yukon, Northwestern Canada, Central British Columbia, Pacific Coast Athabaskan and Apachean. Beaver belongs to the Northwestern Canadian languages. It is closely related to its neighboring Athabaskan languages, e.g. Sekani, Dene (Slavey), Chipewyan and Kaska and, additionally, there is heavy language contact with Dene (Slavey) in the North and Sekani in the South-West.
:: the project :: The data recorded by the team are intended to be as varied as possible. Starting off with elicited word lists and verbal paradigms, the focus shifted to the recording of longer narratives - traditional as well as personal - on audio and video. Furthermore, the documentation of traditional activities such as moose hunting, berry picking, or hand games is a central part of the project. Lastly, Beaver placenames are recorded together with stories about important places or personal travel, yielding the possibility to easily explore spatial expressions in this Athabaskan language and to trigger memories by working with speakers at the sites of their stories. Since the Beaver language has not been written so far, the project together with the Beaver First Nation compiled an orhtography. After that a digital interactive alphabet file with sound examples, and a preliminary dictionary have been created. Furthermore, the data have been used for a "Calender in the Beaver language" as well as for a digital interactive story collection. In addition, we are designing a community portal to facilitate the use of the archive, especially for the elders, and interested family members.
:: the archive :: The four main nodes have the following contents: a) The "General introductory comments" contain the access rights information for other researchers, linguists, and people who are interested in our data. All references to resources found for the Beaver language and culture will be assembled in the bibliography part. The orthography and other conventions used in our archive will be displayed and explained in this general introduction, too. b) The "teaching material and homepages"-node contains subtitled videos, the interactive alphabet file, the Beaver calender, and a phrase book. Further resources for language teaching in the community will be added. c) The "studies"-node is devided into two main branches, one concerning linguistic studies, the other cultural surveys including ethnological, botanical, geographical, and historical information. The linguistic part includes comparative studies and information on genetic affiliation besides grammatical and lexical descriptions and sociolinguistic data. d) The main part of the archive is the "data"-node, containing almost 800 linguistic media files with elicited word lists, verb paradigms, phrases, and sessions on different topics of the grammar of Beaver. Under the „non-elicited“ node material about Beaver prophets and traditional placenames is displayed, together with files containing natural language use in the form of stories with biographic, narrative and procedural contents as well as dialogues and cultural events.
