KUEI!

Welcome to the DDI site.

The research team ‘Documentation et description de l’innu’ (DDI), led by Professor Lynn Drapeau, is dedicated to the study and analysis of the Innu language, also known as Montagnais, spoken in north-eastern Quebec, Canada. The team includes professors, researchers, students and members of the community interested in the development of knowledge on this indigenous language, spoken by more than 13,000 speakers in eleven different communities.

Research within the DDI team is based on corpora of textual data, elicited directly from members of the language community and therefore subscribes to the language documentation research paradigm as proposed by UNESCO. Among others, research work by the DDI team members focus on morphosyntactic analyses, informed by the discourse and pragmatic contexts, on ethnographic sociolinguistics (language contact, bilingualism), lexicography and literacy (including the development of a unified standard orthography). Algonquian languages in general have not been well represented in typological studies to date and we hope our research will contribute to change this state of affairs.

The objectives of this site are therefore to enhance research on indigenous languages, and particularly those on Innu, by giving it increased visibility and greater accessibility, by organizing and supporting the development of linguistic archives, by helping the members of the research team and those of indigenous language communities to appropriate the necessary linguistic tools and technologies. The ultimate goal of this research project is to document the Innu language, including not only a grammar, but also a completely transcribed, translated and annotated oral linguistic corpus, for the long term preservation of the language.

This project is financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, grant # 856-2009-0073.