One of the core tenets of any museum is preservation. For Alaska native museums around the state, one of the things they work to preserve is languages. Now, a new interactive map through the Alutiiq Museum is offering you a new way to listen and learn the native language.
KODIAK, Alaska - One of the core tenets of any museum is preservation. For Alaska Native museums statewide, the preservation of language is considered of the utmost importance.“My project for was documenting Kodiak Island place names, and I had a lot of support from working here at the Alutiiq Museum ,” Director of Language and Living Culture at the Alutiiq Museum , Dehrich Chya said.
“Then, making publicly accessible for people, because place names are a part of our language that is, I don’t want to say like forgotten, but it’s something that is really like - even if you’re speaking fluently in your native language - place names are something that you can really easily substitute the English name for a place with its traditional name.” The project hasn’t come without challenges. Chya said that as village elders pass on, the language fades, and finding pronunciations and references to the places becomes increasingly challenging. “Whether it was stuff that’s been done in the last 50 years, or names that were recorded in old foreign explorers’ journals and maps... finding all of that and tracing or tracking them down so that it could be incorporated into this data was also a challenge,” Chya added. The idea of an Alutiiq language map was inspired by some of the language preservation work that has been done around Alaska. “There’s a really great map of Bristol Bay area place names that is interactive... you know what some of those names sound like in Yupik and in Chupik,” Chya explained. In addition to being able to hear the name of a place in the native language, with the map, you can see it as well. “We’ve also included photos of places, so that way anybody can have that connection to that place,” he said.“We do take photo donations at the museum. “So, if people have photos of some of these real remote places, then there’s a chance we’d be able to incorporate them into the map somewhere down the line. “But also, if you know, maybe if your family has a speaker in their family or somebody who has place names knowledge, we’re constantly looking to expand our map,” Chya concluded.Alaska woman charged in husband’s stabbing death just after anniversaryLa Nina season predicted for fall and early winter
Language Map Alaska Alutiiq Yupik Chupik Bristol Bay Dehrich Chya
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