Edgartown resident Bruce Nevin has received a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to complete a linguistic database of Achumawi, the language of the Pit River people in northeastern California. According to a press release, the award is part of the highly competitive Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program, a joint funding program of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and advance scientific and scholarly knowledge concerning endangered human languages.
The release goes on to say that roughly half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are facing imminent death. DEL seeks not only to acquire scientific data that will soon be unobtainable, but to integrate, systematize, and make the resulting linguistic findings widely available by exploiting advances in information technology. The grant will allow Mr. Nevin to incorporate all available archival materials on the language, together with his own extensive collection of texts, songs, and other language data recorded from the last fluent speakers, beginning in 1970 and extending to the early 1990s.
Understanding the unusual characteristics of Achumawi will deepen our grasp of human cognitive and cultural processes, and reconstructing the prehistory of the Americas depends crucially upon accurate and comprehensive language data.
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