A University of Alberta linguist is working with communities in Colombia to revitalize a seriously endangered language with fewer than 200 fluent first-language speakers left.
Sáliba, an Indigenous language spoken in Colombia, remains little understood. But a number of audio recordings that include narratives, songs and procedural texts — along with handwritten annotations — made by Colombian linguist Jon Landaburu in the late 1960s could help in preserving the language and culture.
To make these materials available to local communities, Jorge Rosés Labrada and his team are creating the first annotated digital archive of naturalistic speech data.
With support from a federal Insight Grant, the accessible archive will help in producing learning materials to assist revitalization efforts already underway in several Sáliba communities. It will also provide a more complete understanding of Sáliba grammar, says Rosés Labrada.
The archive “will make the materials available to researchers and to the communities where they originated, itself an important act of repatriation.”
Collaborating with Heliodoro Caribana, a Sáliba speaker and retired school teacher, the team is also working on a bilingual Spanish/Sáliba illustrated book of five traditional stories to be distributed in schools and households.