Community consultation and the development of an online Akuzipik- E nglish dictionary (2023)

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new online dictionary of Akuzipik, an Indigenous language of St. Lawrence Island (Alaska) and Chukotka (Russia).We discuss community desires for strengthening language use in the community and in educational settings, and present specific features of an online dictionary designed to serve these community goals.

## introduction akuzipik (iso 639-3: ess) is a polysynthetic language on the yupik branch of the inuit-yupik-unangan language family. foot_0 akuzipik is spoken in the two villages -sivuqaq (english: gambell) and sivungaq (english: savoonga) -on the island of sivuqaq (st. lawrence island, alaska), and by individuals who grew up on the island and have since moved to mainland alaska, and on the far eastern coast of the chukotka peninsula of russia. @xcite estimated the total number of speakers in russia at fewer than 200, all in their 50s or older at the time; a scholar working in chukotka (anastasia panova, p.c. july 2022) estimates the current total at no more than a few dozen fluent speakers. in alaska, the ages of fluent speakers reflect a generational divide that began in earnest in the early 1990s @xcite : speakers born before 1980 (now in their 40s and older) tend to have grown up with akuzipik as their first language, learning english in school, and are essentially all fully fluent in both akuzipik and in english. youth under 20 are much less likely to speak akuzipik, although varying degrees of passive fluency can be observed. @xcite estimated the total number of l1 akuzipik speakers to be between 800 and 900 of an ethnic population of approximately 2400 individuals. attitudes towards akuzipik on sivuqaq are generally very positive, including in younger generations, with widespread community support for language revitalization. in recent years, commu-figure 2 : example output from our 2019 akuzipik-english online dictionary @xcite nity members in the village of sivuqaq established a language revitalization committee. current goals include the short-term aim of a language nest embedding fluent akuzipik elders within the existing pre-school program, and a long-term goal of a full akuzipik immersion curriculum in the local school. over the past four years, we have conducted linguistic fieldwork in the village of sivuqaq, both remotely (due to the covid-19 pandemic) and more recently in person. during that time, we have consulted with community members, including the language revitalization committee and the elected tribal council, and have gathered feedback regarding community priorities and desires regarding technology in the context of language revitalization and language education. in this paper, we provide a brief overview of this feedback and present a new online dictionary that incorporates what we have learned. ## limitations of prior work: 2019 akuzipik-english online dictionary despite the existence of a two-volume bilingual akuzipik-english dictionary @xcite , access to this dictionary in its printed form is largely inaccessible to the average akuzipik speaker for everyday use because of its cost and multi-volume form-factor. a small number of physical copies of the dictionary are kept in the local school, but are not generally available to residents of the village. overall, this has meant that very few community members on the island have access to the akuzipik-english dictionary; we believe the situation to be quite similar in chukotka with respect to the akuzipik-russian print dictionary. to address this lack of accessibility, following consultation with the native village of gambell, in 2019 we released the first online akuzipik-english dictionary @xcite ). 2 our 2019 online dictionary, illustrated in figure 2 ## community consultation process prior to the covid-19 pandemic, we met in person with representatives of the native village of gambell (the local elected tribal governing council) and other community groups, including the local language revitalization group, to discuss community priorities and desires regarding language technology in the context of language revitalization and language education. our methodology in these fieldwork excursions are discussed in @xcite and @xcite . one issue that arose consistently during discussion with the tribal council and in informal discussions with community members was a desire to support akuzipik language use by young adults, and especially young parents. the lack of access to akuzipik language resources (including the dictionary) was consistently raised. some of the most enthusiastic support we heard in favor of the development of high-quality onlineaccessible akuzipik language resources was from members of the language community who had grown up in or had subsequently moved to cities such as nome or anchorage in mainland alaska. many of these we spoke with were in their 30s and 40s fluent or semi-fluent speakers of akuzipik, and often living away from the island. some speakers wished to consult the dictionary for words they don't know or no longer remember, or to help in their efforts to teach their children the language. some english-speaking non-native teachers at the school also requested access the dictionary. we continued remote consultation with various community members and organizations throughout the covid-19 pandemic, an undertaking we present a detailed accounting of in @xcite , and in doing so identified the limitations listed in section 2 on the previous page. as we identified shortcomings of our 2019 online dictionary, we began the development of a new online dictionary designed to explicitly address these limitations and to incorporate additional communityrequested features. we describe these in detail in section 4 on the following page. we resumed in-person visits to the island in the summer of 2022, the fall of 2022, and the spring of 2023. during these visits, we presented our resulting new online dictionary to the native village of gambell, to the local language revitalization group, and to students and teachers at the local school. overall, reception was positive, with many community members expressing their excitement to have access to the dictionary on their own devices. members of the tribal council expressed their support for our continued work on the dictionary project and directed us to a number of community members that would be good candidates for eventual participating in audio recordings of the dictionary's content. our ongoing community consultation resulted in two additional specific requests that we have since implemented. in summer 2022, the community language revitalization group requested a "word of the day" to be displayed on the front page of the online dictionary. in november 2022, a community member voiced concern that the original compilers of the bilingual dictionary @xcite had not been the prominence and credit on the online dictionary's main page that it deserved as a substantial documentary work. we promptly fulfilled both of these requests, adding a "word of the day" to the front page of the online dictionary and prominently crediting @xcite on both the front page and on all entries and data that were sourced from that work. dissemination of our online dictionary was initially by word of mouth up through early 2022, along with some mention through local use of social media. later in 2022, several speakers made facebook posts about the dictionary which garnered hundreds of responses on the social media platform. following these posts, using basic web analytics, were were able to identify that the majority of the online dictionary's regular users are located on mainland alaska. in november 2022, following additional local consultation, we hung posters with a qr code in public buildings, and left extra posters with tribal and city officials, at their request. ## resolving prior limitations and fulfilling community requests: 2023 akuzipik-english online dictionary in this section, we present our online akuzipik-english bilingual dictionary. 3, 4 this dictionary is the direct result of the ongoing community consultation process described in section 3 on the previous page. we present features that address each of the shortcomings described in section 2 and the community requests identified in section 3. overall, efforts have been made to increase the visibility of dictionary entries and to make metalinguistic data and analyses more readable to non-linguists. ## ongoing and future work a number of improvements that have not yet been implemented are currently in progress. ## conclusion: process and ownership throughout our work with the akuzipik-speaking community, we have sought to humbly and respectfully provide the tools and expertise that we as academic researchers are able to bring to the table. we have sought to build and will continue to seek meaningful and long-lasting relationships with individuals and governing bodies on st. lawrence island. and yet, it remains the case that we are not indigenous. as we seek to ethically engage in this work through continual relationship-building and meaningful consultation with community members and elected tribal leadership, we continue to bear in mind the moral obligations of cognizance, beneficence, accountability, and non-maleficence @xcite as we work with indigenous data. a critically important consideration in this work is the goal of a mechanism for community input and ownership over the data contained in the dictionary. in addition to integrating feedback from users regarding word usage and glossing, indicating differences in usage between individuals, clans, and language varieties is important for demonstrating the community's ownership of the data. we hope that an eventual crowd-sourced communitygoverned data framework will also contribute to the tool's longevity and help to accomplish one of the core objectives of the akuzipik reclamation project at large, namely, its self-sustainability. ultimately, we intend feedback in the form of word frequency, clan/individual variation, and other fine-tuning of the documentary record to be received and integrated into the dictionary by a team of community linguists trained in and devoted to the upkeep of the project.