“It’s writtenniistobut it sounds likeknee stew.”

Abstract

This paper argues for pragmatism rather than linguistic purity in orthography design for endangered Indigenous languages such as Blackfoot, emphasizing the need to see orthography standardization as a dynamic process rather than a static result. It explores the ongoing lack of community agreement about the best way to write the Blackfoot language and lack of widespread proficiency in the use of its standard orthography, and then describes ways in which this is mitigated in the Blackfoot Language Resources and Digital Dictionary project, a suite of web resources created to support language maintenance and revitalization work. The website uses a combination of relaxed searches, alternative spelling fields, and multimedia content to increase accessibility of the resources for users lacking proficiency in the standard orthography.

Voice Onset Time in a language without voicing contrast: An acoustic analysis of Blackfoot oral stops

“…Such a situation is by no means unique to Blackfoot; similar disagreements in other North-American Indigenous communities are described by Hinton (2014), who coined the term 'orthography wars'. Writers of Blackfoot who have not been trained in the standard orthography often use the letters <b d g>, digraphs consisting of these letters followed by <h> (<bh dh gh>), or digraphs combining the English voiceless and voiced letters (<bp td kg>), especially in contexts where English voiceless stops would have the long VOT associated with aspiration (Genee 2020). The finding that Blackfoot stops have VOTs that are very similar to those of English voiced (short lag) stops also supports some practices commonly seen in L2 teaching contexts when teachers explain how to pronounce the Blackfoot letters <p t k>, or correct L2 pronunciations of Blackfoot stops pronounced with too much aspiration: the learner is often told to 'make it sound more like a b/d/g'.…”

“…The standard orthography developed by Frantz (1978Frantz ( , 1993Frantz ( , 2017 was officially adopted by the Canadian Nation schoolboards in 1975 (Frantz 2017: 185) but has not found general acceptance or universal implementation. Fluent elderly speakers tend not to be proficient in it, and several alternative orthographies and spelling systems, including a syllabary, are also in use in the community (Genee 2020).…”

“…Applied reasons include questions related to (first and second) language learning and accent acquisition (Riney & Takagi 2008;Kong, Beckman & Edwards 2012;Turner et al 2014;Netelenbos, Li & Rosen 2016;Kakadelis 2018: 37-38), and orthography design for minority languages in bilingual contexts where the majority language (which tends to be the one whose orthography is adapted to be used for the minority language) has a voicing distinction and the minority one does not (Hinton 2014, Garvin 2018. In fact, the work reported in this paper was originally prompted by a desire to better understand the continuing disagreement in the Blackfoot-speaking community about which letters to use to write Blackfoot oral stops: the <p t k> series, as in the standard orthography developed by linguist Donald G. Frantz (Frantz 1978(Frantz , 1993(Frantz , 2017, or the <b d g> series, as preferred by many community members, at least in some environments (Genee 2020). The frequent preference to use <b d g> in representing Blackfoot stops is partly due to the influence of the English orthography, which denotes its series of phonetically voiceless unaspirated stops with these three letters.…”