Main Links
Home
ANLC Website
Alaska's Digital Archives
AK Polar Regions Archives
Collection Finding Aids
Aleut
Bergsland
Central Alaskan Yup'ik
Comparative Eskimo-Aleut Language Collection
Deg Xinag
Dena’ina
Han
Holikachuk
Inupiaq
Tanacross
Gwich’in
Tanana
Upper Tanana
Upper Kuskokwim
Search Collections
  |
|
Alaska Native Language Center Archive
The Alaska Native Language Center Archive is located in the Brooks Building on the UAF campus and is open to the public weekdays between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM and by appointment. A public reading room and photocopying facilities are available. Contact (907) 474-7874 or fyanlp@uaf.edu for more information.
The Archive contains more than 15,000 documents and 5,000 recordings in and on Alaska Native languages and related languages. The coverage includes virtually everything written on or in the Native languages of Alaska, from the earliest documentation to the most recent educational materials. Materials include lexicons, from wordlists beginning in the 1770’s to modern comprehensive dictionaries; specialized lexical work, such as studies of kinship terms or placenames; grammatical and dialectological work; comparative work in Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit and Eskimo-Aleut linguistics; textual materials, such as traditional stories and missionary texts; and pedagogical materials for bilingual programs. A complete catalog of the ANLC archive collections was published in 1980. We are currently working to update this catalog and make it available online.
|
|
A Single Point of Access
The ANLC Archive strives to be a single point of access for documentary materials relating to Alaska Native languages. In addition to holding original field notes, manuscripts and other primary materials, the Archive diverges from traditional archival collection practice in including some widely-distributed published materials and copies of documents from other archives. To that end, the Archive contains originals or copies of substantial works written in or about Alaska Native languages. In addition to original documents, which make up approximately 60 percent of the collection, the Archive contains rare publications, including antiques, small press publications unlikely to be extant elsewhere, publications not widely available in the United States, such as copies of holdings from Russia and the erstwhile Soviet Union’s Archives, copies of field notes and unpublished materials still held in private hands, and of course ANLC’s own publications. The Archive also has copies of work held in other Archives, including works by Benveniste, Sapir, and Boas, as well as many lesser-known linguistic scholars.
Alaska Native Languages Center Manuscript Collection
The main collection consists of materials relating to Alaska’s twenty Native languages. The scope is broadly defined to include languages spoken outside of Alaska provided they are also spoken in Alaska. Thus, comprehensive coverage is attempted for transnational languages such Aleut and Siberian Yupik, which are also spoken in Russia, and Tlingit, Tsimshian, Haida, Han and Gwich’in, which are also spoken in Canada. An exception to this practice is made for Inuit, a dialect chain extending across the arctic from western Alaska to eastern Greenland. While the Archive contains significant collections on Greenlandic and Eastern Canadian Inuit dialects, no attempt at comprehensive coverage has been attempted for these dialects. The concept of Native language is further extend to include pidgins and creoles and nativized world languages. Thus, the Archive contains comprehensive coverage of pidgins such Slavey Jargon and Chinook Jargon; creoles such as Copper Island Aleut; and Old Russian as spoken by descendants of Russian colonists.
The languages form the basis of separate series; for finding aids to the holdings in each of these language collections, click on the map of the links above.
Related Languages Manuscript Collection
The ANLC Archive also contains a significant (though not comprehensive) collection of comparative materials in genetically related languages. These include in particular the languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family and the Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit family. In addition, the Archive also contains some materials on, e.g. Navajo, Apache, and other languages related to Athabascan.
The comparative materials and the non-Alaskan languages are organized separately as their own series; for finding aids to the holdings in these collections, click on the links below:
Comparative Eskimo-Aleut
Comparative Athabascan
Greenlandic
[Other language series in progress]
Special Manuscript Collections
The Archive also houses several special collections of significant importance to Alaska Native languages. These include most notably the complete papers relating to Eskimo and Aleut of linguist Knut Bergsland and former ANLC faculty member E. Irene Reed. These collections are curated separately in order to maintain their intellectual integrity; for finding aids to the holdings in these collections, click on the links below:
Audio Collection
The audio collection contains more than 5000 recordings of Alaska Native languages dating from 1943 as well as copies of some early wax and wire recordings. The audio collection includes narratives, lexical elicitation, and classroom recordings, among many other topics. Unlike the main Alaska Native languages collection, there has been no attempt at comprehensive coverage. By some estimates, the audio collection may represent only 10% of the total extant recordings of Alaska Native languages when the number of recordings held in other collections is taken into account.
The audio collection contains original recordings that were sponsored by or donated to the Archive, as well as many recordings obtained from other collections. Currently, the Archive does not have the capability to authorize duplication of many of these materials.
The audio collection is currently being digitized. Many of the recordings have also been catalogued and can be searched within the database, although a finding aid is not currently available.
Funding
Funding for manuscript collection processing, manuscript finding aid development, and the development of this website was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant # PA-50139-03). Manuscript and audio processing as well as finding aid content is also based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0326805 and 0503782. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF) or of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
|
|
|
|
|
