June marks the National Indigenous History Month of Canada, an opportunity to learn about the rich cultures, traditions and experiences of the Indigenous Peoples on this land. Language Sciences is honoured and humbled to bring you a series of content from our scholar-members who work on researching, maintaining, and vitalizing different Indigenous languages with their speaker-community. These languages are far from being mere means of communication. Rather, they represent complex systems of knowledge and culture developed over millennia, anchoring the identity of Indigenous communities that continue to inspire and evolve with society. In fact, it is precisely the tie between language and identity that has inspired many scholars to embark their research. One of such research is by Dr. Christopher Hammerly, Assistant Professor at the Linguistics Department, on the Ojibwe language.
Dr. Hammerly's interest in Ojibwe stems from his personal connection to the language. His grandmother on his father's side grew up on the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, making him a member (descendent) of the White Earth Nation. Growing up away from the community in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, he wanted all that connected to that part of his identity, including the language. When he started at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Hammerly was able to take Ojibwe language classes and began to think of combining his interest in linguistics and cognitive science with his desire to learn Ojibwe and support the wider revitalization movement. Many years later, this initial flame turned into his latest SSHRC-Insight-Grant-funded project to study two tightly linked phenomena in Ojibwe.
We spoke to Dr. Hammerly about his work.
Can you please tell us about your project?
The primary goal of the project is to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between two tightly linked phenomena in Ojibwe: grammatical person and voice. Person allows nouns to refer to different sorts of people and things, such as the speaker of an utterance (first person), the listener (second person), and various other beings and objects (third person). Voice provides a way to encode how nouns are linked to different grammatical positions like subject or object, as well as functional roles like whether something is the “doer” or “undergoer” of some action. We’ve just wrapped-up the first year of the project, where we’ve been focusing almost all our energy on creating an automatic morphological analyzer/generator for Ojibwe. This is a computational tool that will allow us to create a parsed corpus of Ojibwe texts, which we can use to understand the distribution of different types of person and voice marking in the language. This will in turn help us characterize the different contexts that license various grammatical constructions related to person and voice, which will support the development of both pedagogical resources as well as linguistic theory. Besides the creation of the corpus, the morphological parser/generator is going to be integrated into a language learning application called Anishinaabemodaa as part of an automatic verb conjugation tool. This should be ready for the 2024-25 school year, and will be used by around 10,000 K-12 students who are using the app as part of their language learning journey in Ontario schools. In the coming years of the grant, we will move into conducting eye tracking studies with both learners and L1 speakers of Ojibwe, and build formal learning models to understand paths for acquiring person and voice systems.
What is the role of communities in your project? Are you planning to work with any, or expect any new communities to be formed?
This work is significantly driven by filling gaps in the tools and materials available to learners of Ojibwe. Most learners of Ojibwe are children and adults from First Nations or tribal nations within the US, and are therefore learning their ancestral language, which, largely as a result of the impact of colonial systems, was not fully acquired over the course of early development. The Ojibwe community spans a large geographic area within both the US and Canada, and while there is dialectical variation, there is a lot that is shared between different communities. So, the project aims to serve the Ojibwe community writ large. However, I specifically work with elders from Treaty #3 territory in Northwestern Ontario, so the work will be specifically informed by the dialect spoken in that region. So those communities will be the ones most directly served by this project, and the ones with which I am working most closely.
Is the SSHRC Insight Grant the first grant you received for the project? If not, can you tell us how you worked your way there?
In order to develop the plan for this grant, I was supported by a Hampton New Faculty Grant from UBC as well as another small internal grant for RA support. I used those funds to spend time in Ontario batting around ideas for the project with various community partners and advisors. I also took advantage of the fantastic support from the Office of Research Services. Long before I started writing the proposal, I attended various information sessions and learned as much as I could about how SSHRC grants are evaluated, how to create a well-motivated budget, and how to balance ambition and feasibility. I also had fantastic Co-I’s in Dr. Miikka Silfverberg and Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier from UBC, and Dr. Antti Arppe from the University of Alberta. Their experience and expertise was instrumental in crafting a successful application.
What advice would you give other researchers who are considering an Insight Grant application?
I think it is important to utilize all of the support that UBC offers. Besides the information sessions, workshops, writing groups, and more, one of the best tools for me was the repository of successful grants. I looked at applications from a wide variety of fields, and that really gave me a sense of how to craft a clear and reasonable proposal. Reading all of those amazing proposals was inspiring, and it had the side benefit of getting to know a bunch of the research that is going on here at UBC.
Outside of this funded project, what areas of research are you interested in?
I am really interested in developing formal theories of syntax, especially in understanding the most basic properties of phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. While this work is a lot more abstract and does not have an immediately direct impact on things like language revitalization, I strongly believe that this sort of basic research is essential. Through formal and rigorous theoretical work, we uncover the foundational properties of human language. In this context, I am continually amazed by the diverse languages that cover the globe. But even more amazingly, we can use formal theories to compare and contrast languages, and uncover the universal properties underlying our uniquely human aptitude for linguistic communication. This leads to some really amazing insights into human cognition and more!
Indigenous History Month Series:
Read Q&A with Starr Sandoval, on "Non-speaker-oriented expressives in Ktunaxa"