Research

AISRI researchers provide public access to the current results of their ongoing projects. The AISRI Dictionary Portal allows the visitor to work with AISRI dictionaries for five languages. The AISRI Northern Caddoan Linguistic Text Corpora Portal is a gateway to texts and narratives in Arikara, Skiri Pawnee, and South Band Pawnee.

AISRI research associates and IU graduate students are also conducting research on Haida, a language isolate; Thompson, a Salishan language; and Kaska, an Athapascan language. Those languages, all endangered, are distributed from the Yukon, down through the Northwest Coast, across the Great Plains, and to the East Coast.

In the course of descriptive work with these languages, AISRI staff have developed new tools for documenting and analyzing them as well as for disseminating their studies in both research and pedagogical formats. The new tools, which have been created for general use by any linguist engaged in the documentation of any language, are the following:

 

In addition to these tools, AISRI has also established the Center for the Documentation of Endangered Languages (CDEL) Sound Laboratory, which supports the various sound recording needs of research and educational projects as well as houses an archive for sound recorded materials.

Several current AISRI projects focus on the history and culture of specific Plains tribes:

The documentation of tribal musical traditions is part of two larger AISRI projects. These projects rely in part on the CDEL Sound Laboratory facility, which provides the technology to enhance older analog sound recordings on wax cylinders and tape.

As part of a larger documentary and research project, research has also focused on Pawnee material culture, utilizing written documentation from earlier in the century combined with the contemporary study of museum specimens.