Another official Alaska Native place name

I had thought that K'esugi Ridge was the only officially recognized Alaska Native place name (not counting anglicizations of Native names). Then I came across a reference to Amchixtam Chaxsxii, the official name given to an underwater seamount in the Rat Islands of the Aleutian chain. Amchixtam Chaxsxii is the only active underwater volcano in the Aleutians. It was surveyed in 2003 by University of Alaska Professor Jennifer Reynolds using remote sensing equipment. Reynolds consulted with Unangan linguist Moses Dirks to find an Unangan name for this newest of Aleutian islands.

Unlike the Dena'ina name K'esugi, the Unangan name does not follow standard orthographic conventions. The official Dena'ina name employs a k-apostrophe (even though many secondary sources omit the apostrophe) as in standard Dena'ina. The Unangan name leaves off a diacritic mark and should be more properly rendered with a hatted-x, Amchixtam Chax̂sxii.

More info at the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

SSILA 2009 Annual Meeting

The annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in San Francisco Jan 8-11 featured several presentations relevant to Alaska Native languages and related languages. The titles give you some idea of issues of current concern to linguistic researchers. More information may be available by contacting the individual authors directly (try searching the university websites for contact information).

• Acoustic correlates of stress in the Inland dialect of Dena’ina Athabascan (Siri Tuttle, University of Alaska, Fairbanks)


• The phonetics of tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa (Julia Colleen Miller, University of Washington)


• A H+L% boundary tone in Athabaskan (Sharon Hargus, University of Washington)


•  Landscape and landscape at the intersection of Athabascan and Eskimo (Gary Holton, University of Alaska Fairbanks)


• The morphosyntax of Navajo comparatives and the degree argument (Elizabeth Bogal­Allbritten, Swarthmore)


• Aspiration as phonation: An acoustic analysis of aspirated affricates in the Dene languages (Joyce McDonough, University of Rochester; Jordan Lachler, Sealaska Heritage Institute; Sally Rice, University of Alberta)


• Coordination in Pribil of Islands Aleut (Anna Berge, University of Alaska Fairbanks)


• A contrastive feature account of Inuit ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ /i/ (Richard Compton and B. Elan Dresher, University of Toronto


• Navajo degree constructions and the decompositional analysis of gradable predicates (Elizabeth Bogal­Allbritten, Swarthmore)

When did literacy come to mean English literacy?

Will English-only never end? While traveling today I noticed a story in USA Today which claims that one in seven US adults in the USA is:

"saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children's picture book"

Of course, many of these adults with low literacy are second-language speakers of English and may well be literate in their native language or another world language. But the survey didn't ask about that. As far as the US Department of Education is concerned, literacy equals English language literacy, in spite of the fact that most bilingual people are more comfortable reading and writing in their first language. (Isn't that why we have translations?)

These attitudes continue to hamper bilingual education. As long as we continue to measure general skills such as literacy by their specific realization in English we will continue to suppress the development of a new generation of bilingual Alaskans.

Ron Scollon: 1939-2009

I am sorry to announce that Ron Scollon passed away January 1, 2009 at his Seattle home. Ron spent his early years as a linguist at the Alaska Native Language Center, where he contributed to the documentation of several Athabascan languages, including Tanacross. But he is perhaps best known for his work in the area of interethnic communication. His 1980 monograph on Athabascan-English Interethnic Communication is still widely used in Alaskan classrooms. Like many of Ron's books, this work was co-authored with his wife Suzanne.

Scollon received training in Athabascan linguistics from reknown Athabaskanist Li Fang-Kuei, himself a student of Edward Sapir. Scollon collaborated with Li on the documentation of Dene Sułine (Chipewyan), and he became the first to apply the techniques of the ethnography of speaking to an Athabascan context. Ron went on to become a preeminent linguist in the field of discourse analysis and intercultural communication, serving for many years as Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

As a prolific scholar, writer, and mentor, Scollon has made an enduring contribution to the study of language in its intercultural context -- an area which remains extremely relevant in Alaska today. An expanded bibliography of Scollon's can be found in the 2002 festschrift Discourses in Search of Members.