


Grant funding was awarded to fund a project to document CHamoru language spoken by first-language speakers.

Former University of Guam President Robert Underwood, a co-principal investigator for the grant, said he estimates there are about 2,000 to 3,000 of these speakers still alive. Many were born in the '30s and '40s and are part of the last generation that learned CHamoru at home as their first language, he said.

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The Documenting Endangered Languages grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded to the UOG College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, will provide about $275,000 for the three-year project.

Underwood said the CHamoru language can be considered an endangered language because it isn't being transmitted intergenerationally in the home.

The goal is to document the CHamoru language used by first-language speakers, which differs from speakers who learned it as a second-language, he said. The project, "Developing CHamoru Language Infrastructure: Goggue Yan Chachalani Mo'na i Fino'-ta (Embrace and Make a Way Forward for Our Language)," will formally document and create a repository for others to use in the future.

It also will develop a group of CHamoru language documenters drawn from university students and language educators.

David Ruskin, a linguistics professor at UOG and co-investigator for the project, and Andrea Berez-Kroeker, a consultant from the University of Hawaii Kapiolani Language Archive, are conducting classes to provide both linguistic and documentation skills for the project. Underwood said the expertise from the two professors is needed, as he doesn't have the credentials in either field.


The Kumision i Fino' CHamoru, or CHamoru Language Commission, is working with the mayors to get recommendations of manamko' from their villages who could be part of the project, Francine Naputi, a project coordinator with the commission said.

Underwood stressed the grant isn't a language teaching grant, but it will document the language so it be used in the future for language learning.

Ruskin said that in linguistic terms, when a group of first-language speakers diminishes in numbers, it shows ill health for the language. He said there is a continued interest in the CHamoru language as there are many second-language speakers, but the language is slightly different for these speakers.

As more people are second-language speakers, a language will change, he said.

The project will take a snapshot of the language as it's spoken by mother-tongue speakers so in the future, their descendants can see it and hear it for themselves, he said.

Recorded by video and audio

Participants will be recorded by video and audio and will speak the language so that the record won't just be a list of words like a dictionary or grammar, but how CHamoru is used and how the words go together by a native speaker, Ruskin said. 

Berez-Kroeker said language documentation takes a long time and for every minute of recording, it could take an hour or more to process it so that it's properly documented. It's also important that they document the information in formats that will be accessible well into the future, she said. 

A local repository will be housed at the Micronesian Area Research Center as well as copies at the University of Hawaii, she said.

The Kumision i Fino’ CHamoru will be a primary partner, maintaining a working repository on the CHamoru language as part of its sponsorship of a Language Revitalization Center, a release from UOG stated.

“This project will simultaneously generate new information and collect existing data in a way that is useful for linguists, the CHamoru community, and academics studying endangered languages,” Ruskin said.


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