Research activities

All of the work summarized below was made possible thanks to the engagement of the Elders, teachers, and learners who participated in our SSHRC Partnership Development Grant. Huy tseep q’u sii’em’, and especially to Swustanulwut Delores Louie and late Sti’tum’at Ruby Peter.

SSHRC funding has allowed us to do a variety of things, from running one-off workshops to creating resources that will hopefully be useful for years to come. Here are some of the things we’ve been up to. If you are interested in a presentation/publication and don’t see a link for it, please use the Contact form to let us know.

Hul’q’umi’num’ Kids’ Speech (2022-23)

Our goal with this project is to understand the developmental pathway of pronunciation acquisition by young Hul’q’umi’num’ learners. We have been making recordings of the children in the early Hul’q’umi’num’ language programs and we have started analyzing them to see what patterns emerge, in terms of how different sounds are pronounced at different ages. This project emerged out of the SSHRC PDG, but has now become its own project and we are thinking about applying for external funding to keep it going.

Hul’q’umi’num’ Interactive Midsagittal tool

To help teach Hul’q’umi’num’ phonetics and phonology, we adapted Daniel Currie Hall’s Interactive Sagittal Section, tailoring specifically to the consonant inventory of Hul’q’umi’num’.

Hul’q’umi’num’ Listening Quizzes (2021-2023)

In 2021-23, we created a series of listening quizzes, based on what we had learnt about the sound and sound sequences that are particularly challenging for learners. These quizzes are designed both as a pedagogical tool – to help learners train their ears on some of the trickier sounds of Hul’q’umi’num’ – and as a research tool – to understand speech perception among Hul’q’umi’num’ learners. The quizzes are based on previously made recordings with nine Hul’q’umi’num’ speaking Elders.

Documentation of Hul’q’umi’num’ L1 and L2 pronunciation (2018-2022)

One of the primary goals of the SSHRC PDG was to document the pronunciation features of Hul’q’umi’num’ learners. Our documentation work has formed the basis a variety of pedagogical tools designed to help with pronunciation teaching and learning, available in the TEACHERS’ CORNER section of this website. 

Pronunciation in the context of story telling (Summer 2020)

In the summer 2020 we held a series of weekly workshops to work on pronunciation in the context of storytelling. We created teams of HLA students (hul’q’umi’num’ learners) and phonetics experts. Together, we picked one or two specific words that students wanted to fine-tune within a story they were learning to tell. We workshopped these using Praat to visualize speech, to compare learner and elder/teacher pronunciations, and to fix up pronunciation of particularly challenging sounds.

  • Team members:
    • HLA students: Chris Alphonse, Rosie George, Martina Joe, Thomas Johnny, Donna Modest, Sharon Seymour
    • UVic phoneticians: Sonya Bird, Tess Nolan, Marion Caldecott, Maida Percival, Janet Leonard, Phil Howson
  • Presentation: Alphonse et al. (2020)

Hul’q’umi’num’ Pronunciation labs (Fall 2019)

In the Fall 2019, Tess Nolan led a series of pronunciation workshops in which participants explored different types of tools and approaches for fine-tuning pronunciation.

  • Team members:
    • Tess Nolan (faciliator)
    • HLA students: Chris Alphonse, Rosie George, Evangeline Guerin, Martina Joe, Thomas Johnny, Bernadette Sam, Sharon Seymour

Hul’q’umi’num’ experimental phonetics collaboration (Spring 2019)

In the Spring 2019, UVic’s LING 486 (Experimental Phonetics) course was taught in collaboration with the Hul’q’umi’num’ Language & Culture Society and the Hul’q’umi’num’ Language Academy. UVic and HLA students worked in teams to research various topics.

Hul’q’umi’num’ graduate course in phonetics and phonology (Summer 2018)

In 2018, we launched the project as part of the SFU Master’s level course LING 830 – Phonetics and Phonology of a First Nations Language: Hul’q’umi’num’. As part of their coursework, students chose a sound or set of sounds they wanted to study; they put together a word list illustrating the sound(s), recorded an Elder pronouncing the words and also themselves and other students, and then analyzed the recordings with an eye to documenting the phonetic details of L1 and L2 pronunciation so that they could be incorporated into pedagogical materials.

  • Team members: Sonya Bird (instructor), Maida Percival (TA), Rae Anne Claxton, HLA MA students
  • Presentations & publication: Claxton et al. (2019) + LD&C (in press)

Our activities in this course led to further work on pronunciation pedagogy in the context of Indigenous Language Revitalization, in two areas:

  1. Community-based phonetics and speech visualization: Bird & Miyashita (2019)
  2. Pronuncation in the context of ILR: Bird & Claxton (2022)