ANLC linguist Siri Tuttle was featured in a Sept 13, 2010 story in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. All in all it's a great article, focusing primarily on Tuttle's recent work to document Minto songs. Still, I can't help but being a bit irked by the use of the word "dialect" in the headline for the piece. Why is it that journalists insist on continuing to refer to Native languages as "dialects," when world languages continue to merit the label "language"? There are at least twenty different Native languages spoken in Alaska, each as different from each other as German is from English. There is a reason we call is the Alaska Native Language Center, not the Alaska Native Dialect Center.
Nice article! It's good to see newspapers caring about the ANLC and its mission.
ReplyDeleteSiri gave a great talk about the Minto songs work at a conference in Lund, Sweden, last week.
ReplyDeleteThere's an abstract of Siri's talk at http://conference.sol.lu.se/hlk-2010/keynote-abstracts/
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