Natalie Weber
Natalie Weber is an Assistant Professor in Phonology at Yale University. Their research focuses on how speech sounds organize into syllables, words, and phrases, and how this varies across different languages. Since 2011 they have worked with individuals from the Blood and Siksika Nations to study this organization of sounds into words in the Blackfoot language. Since 2020 a major project has been typing up written words of Blackfoot from the 1700s and 1800s so that they are searchable and available for all.
What can we learn from the way Old Blackfoot was written?
Although Blackfoot is an oral language, many Blackfoot words and phrases were written down in the 18th and 19th centuries by missionaries and other settlers. This historical record preserves many older words and older meanings of words. In this presentation, I demonstrate Blackfoot Words, a database that currently includes nine of these older sources. I show how the database could be used by language teachers and learners to explore meanings and connections inside of Blackfoot words. I also discuss some of the speaker and dialect variation in the database and how this leads to new questions about Blackfoot: (1) how has Blackfoot pronunciation changed over time, and (2) what is the current landscape of speaker variation?