AN ONLINE DICTIONARY WITH TEXTS AND PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS:

In this paper, I report on an online dictionary project for a highly endangered Native language of North America. This project involves a dynamic lexicon, linked to a corpus of texts and enriched with several associated tools, which is designed to be useful for (and is regularly used by) scholars, language teachers, and language learners. The inter-est of this project for a broader audience emerges not from lexicographic innovations as such, but from how texts and lexicon are combined and how the interests of diverse user communities are addressed. 1. Background 1.1 Language context Yurok is spoken in northwestern California, near the Oregon border; it is one of three distantly related branches of the Algic language family. One of the other two branches also consists of a single language, Wiyot, formerly spoken just to the south along the Pacific coast; Teeter (1964) presents an overview (the last first-language speaker died in the 1960s). The third Algic branch comprises the widely dispersed Algonquian language family of central and eastern North America; for a brief survey see Mithun (1999: 327-340). Like most indigenous languages of California, Yurok was spoken in pre-contact times by relatively few people in a small territory; there were about 2,500 Yurok people occupying 80 miles along the lower Klamath River and the Pacific coast (Kroeber 1925: 17). In 2011 there are still a few elderly first-language speakers of Yurok, but it is no longer easy for them to play an active role in language teaching. (At the other end of the North American spectrum, compare Navajo, with over 150,000 speakers in Arizona and New Mexico, or the Algonquian language Ojibwe, with some 50,00