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Council obtains a grant to study Chamorro language
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Posted on Sep 10 2008
The NMI Council for the Humanities has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for a three-year collaborative project to study and help preserve the Chamorro language.
The project will be co-directed by retired educator and former Humanities Council board chair Dr. Elizabeth D. Rechebei and Dr. Sandra Chung, professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. They will work with the Chamorro community in the Commonwealth to significantly upgrade the documentation of the language.
Dr. Rechebei will supervise a working group that will revise the existing Chamorro-English Dictionary and videotape the life histories of Chamorro elders. Dr. Chung will prepare a Chamorro reference grammar and conduct workshops on descriptive linguistics for members of the working group.
Total funds awarded for the three-year collaborative project are $300,000, of which approximately $285,000 will go to the Council to support work in the Northern Marianas. The remainder will go to the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The grammar, revised dictionary, and oral histories—in video and print formats—will provide a highly detailed, accessible record of the Chamorro language for future generations.
The completed project will also serve as a valuable reference for the development of the next generation of Chamorro bilingual education materials—contributing to the teaching and learning of the language—which Rechebei and Chung said could make a critical difference to its long-term survival.[B][I] (PR)[/I][/B]
