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1. Akuzipik/Yupik (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, USA; Chukotka, Russia) – Language Snapshot

   Koonooka, Christopher Petuwaq ; Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. ; Masella Soldati, Giulia ; Schwartz, Lane ; Hunt, Benjamin ; Haas, Preston ; Chen, Emily ; Park, Hyunji Hayley ( December 2021 , Language documentation and description)

   Akuzipik (Yupigestun/Yupik/St. Lawrence Island Yupik/Siberian Yupik/Chaplinski Yupik) is an endangered language belonging to the Yupik branch of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family. It is currently spoken by 800-900 people in the Bering Strait region, mainly on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), and on the coast of the Chukotka Peninsula, in Russia (Chaplinski Yupik) (de Reuse 1994; Schwartz et al. 2019). The linguistic differences between these two varieties seem to be minor and not affect mutual intelligibility (Krauss 1975). The language has been undergoing a rapid generational shift, beginning in the 1950s in Russia and in the 1990s in Alaska (Schwartz et al. 2019). 

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2. Akuzipik/Yupik (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, USA; Chukotka, Russia) - Language Snapshot

   https://doi.org/10.25895/ldd43  

   Koonooka, Christopher Petuwaq ; Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. ; Soldati, Giulia Masella ; Schwartz, Lane ; Hunt, Benjamin ; Haas, Preston ; Chen, Emily ; Park, Hyunji Hayley ( December 2021 , Language documentation and description)

   Akuzipik (Yupigestun/Yupik/St. Lawrence Island Yupik/Siberian Yupik/Chaplinski Yupik) is an endangered language belonging to the Yupik branch of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family. It is currently spoken by 800-900 people in the Bering Strait region, mainly on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), and on the coast of the Chukotka Peninsula, in Russia (Chaplinski Yupik) (de Reuse 1994; Schwartz et al. 2019). The linguistic differences between these two varieties seem to be minor and not affect mutual intelligibility (Krauss 1975). The language has been undergoing a rapid generational shift, beginning in the 1950s in Russia and in the 1990s in Alaska (Schwartz et al. 2019). 

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3. A Digital Corpus of St. Lawrence Island Yupik

   Schwartz, Lane ; Chen, Emily ; Park, Hyunji Hayley ; Jahn, Edward ; Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. ( March 2021 , Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-4))

   null (Ed.)

   St. Lawrence Island Yupik (ISO 639-3: ess) is an endangered polysynthetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family indigenous to Alaska and Chukotka. This work presents a step-by-step pipeline for the digitization of written texts, and the first publicly available digital corpus for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, created using that pipeline. This corpus has great potential for future linguistic inquiry and research in NLP. It was also developed for use in Yupik language education and revitalization, with a primary goal of enabling easy access to Yupik texts by educators and by members of the Yupik community. A secondary goal is to support development of language technology such as spell-checkers, text-completion systems, interactive e-books, and language learning apps for use by the Yupik community. 

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4. Community-Focused Language Documentation in Support of Language Education and Revitalization for St. Lawrence Island Yupik

   Schwartz, Lane ; Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. ; Chen, Emily ( January 2019 , Études inuit)

   null (Ed.)

   St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language of the Bering Strait region spoken by fewer than one thousand people in western Alaska and far eastern Russia, is currently in a state of generational transition. We survey the existing body of Yupik literature and pedagogical resources developed during the twentieth century, examine the context and use of Yupik in the current educational setting, and describe current challenges for teaching the language in the schools. We then outline our integrated approach to language documentation currently being applied to Yupik, and address how existing resources can be integrated into research and development processes in a way that both supports research efforts and results in tangible modern educational tools for the Yupik community on St. Lawrence Island, and eventually in Russia. This approach is intentionally designed to closely integrate research processes from language documentation and computational linguistics such that the results of each research endeavour positively support the other, and such that both disciplines concretely support community-based efforts to revitalize and teach the language. 

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5. A Morphological Analyzer for St. Lawrence Island / Central Siberian Yupik

   Chen, Emily ; Schwartz, Lane ( May 2018 , LREC proceedings)

   St. Lawrence Island / Central Siberian Yupik is an endangered language, indigenous to St. Lawrence Island in Alaska and the Chukotka Peninsula of Russia, that exhibits pervasive agglutinative and polysynthetic properties. This paper discusses an implementation of a finite-state morphological analyzer for Yupik that was developed in accordance with the grammatical standards and phenomena documented in Steven A. Jacobson’s 2001 reference grammar for Yupik. The analyzer was written in foma, an open source framework for constructing finite-state grammars of morphology. The approach presented here cyclically interweaves morphology and phonology to account for the language’s intricate morphophonological system, an approach that may be applicable to languages of matching typology. The morphological analyzer has been designed to serve as foundational resource that will eventually underpin a suite of computational tools for Yupik to assist in the process of linguistic documentation and revitalization. 

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