Liinnaqumalghiit: A web-based tool for addressing orthographic transparency in St. Lawrence Island/Central Siberian Yupik

We present an initial web-based tool for St. Lawrence Island/Central Siberian Yupik, an endangered language of Alaska and Russia. This work is supported by the local language community on St. Lawrence Island, and includes an orthographic utility to convert from standard Latin orthography into a fully transparent representation, a preliminary spell checker, a Latin-to-Cyrillic transliteration tool, and a preliminary Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration tool. Also included is a utility to convert from standard Latin orthography into both IPA and Americanist phonetic notation. Our utility is also capable of explicitly marking syllable boundaries and stress in the standard Latin orthography using the conventions of Jacobson (2001), as well as in Cyrillic and in standard IPA notation. These tools are designed to facilitate the digitization of existing Yupik resources, facilitate additional linguistic field work, and most importantly, bolster efforts by the local Yupik communities in the U.S. and in Russia to promote Yupik usage and literacy, especially among Yupik youth

Multidirectional leveraging for computational morphology and language documentation and revitalization

St. Lawrence Island Yupik is an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. In this paper, we describe our work on Yupik jointly leveraging computational morphology and linguistic fieldwork, outlining the multilayer virtuous cycle that we continue to refine in our work to document and build tools for the language. After developing a preliminary morphological analyzer from an existing pedagogical grammar of Yupik, we used it to help analyze new word forms gathered through fieldwork. While in the field, we augmented the analyzer to include insights into the lexicon, phonology, and morphology of the language as they were gained during elicitation sessions and subsequent data analysis. The analyzer and other tools we have developed are improved by a corpus that continues to grow through our digitization and documentation efforts, and the computational tools in turn allow us to improve and speed those same efforts. Through this process, we have successfully identified previously undescribed lexical, morphological, and phonological processes in Yupik while simultaneously increasing the coverage of the morphological analyzer. Given the polysynthetic nature of Yupik, a high-coverage morphological analyzer is a necessary prerequisite for the development of other high-level computational tools that have been requested by the Yupik community.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome Variation of Eastern Aleut Populations: Implications for the Genetic Structure and Peopling of the Aleutian Archipelago

The Aleuts are the native inhabitants of the Aleutian archipelago off the southwest coast of Alaska and, since Russian contact in 1741, have experienced a series of demographic transitions. This study investigates the impact of historical events on the genetic structure of the Aleut population through analysis of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA variation in five eastern Aleut communities in relation to previous molecular research conducted on communities located further to the west. Results from HVS-I sequencing and Y-SNP and Y-STR typing reveal patterns of variability that exhibit geographic differentiation in an east-west manner. Mitochondrial haplogroups A and D represent the two major maternal lineages observed in the Aleut samples, with haplogroup D more prevalent in the Pribilofs and island groups located to the west. This distribution pattern is likely the result of founder effect related to the forced population resettlements organized by Russian fur traders in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the eastern Aleutian Islands and lower Alaska Peninsula, higher frequencies of haplogroup A and its subclades were observed and based on archaeological and phylogeographic evidence may represent the genetic signature of sustained cultural and demic exchange with neighboring Eskimo and Na-Dene groups. The relationship between geography and mtDNA variation is further evident from the highly significant correlation of geographic and genetic distance matrices (r = 0.717) and the decreasing correlogram of spatial autocorrelation values that present a clinal pattern to mtDNA structure. For the Aleut Y-chromosomes, the vast majority were characterized to European haplogroups (approximately 85%), which contrasts the mtDNA picture that reveals only 6.1% non-native matrilines in the eastern region and thus indicating asymmetrical gene flow between European men and Aleut women. Russian paternal lineages are common in the western islands, whereas the predominantly Scandinavian patriline I1a is observed at elevated frequencies in the eastern communities, a consequence of the American purchase of Alaska and the subsequent influx of Scandinavian and US European fishermen into the region. The application of Monmonier's algorithm and genetic surface interpolations for both genetic systems reveal geographic zones of discontinuity at Umnak and Akutan Islands, underscoring the east-west substructure for the Aleut population. Lastly, phylogeographic analysis of mtDNA data and the results of recent ancient DNA studies suggest that subhaplogroup D2 evolved in Beringia and may represent the ancestral gene pool for both Paleo-Eskimos and Aleuts. Overall, this study identifies a significant relationship between geography and genetic variation in the Aleut population, with a distinct substructure along an east-west axis. These regional differences are due to a combination of historical founder effects, male-biased gene flow from European populations, and the peopling of the Aleutian Archipelago during the postglacial period

Formerly used defense sites on islands in the Bering Sea: hotspots of contamination and health risks to local communities and wildlife

The Arctic is an important indicator region for assessing properties and effects of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The Arctic is subject to atmospheric deposition of globally distilled POPs, acting as a hemispheric sink for POPs that are transported from lower latitudes. Additionally, the Arctic contains thousands of contaminated formerly used defense (FUD) sites dating from World War II and the Cold War, many of which are co-located with rural communities and remain significant sources of POPs. The Arctic is therefore a repository of persistent chemicals that are readily transported through the atmosphere or that are released from FUD sites. Once POPs enter the Arctic, low temperatures and low intensity sunlight slow their deterioration, which makes them available for long-term incorporation into biological systems, especially in lipid-rich arctic food webs. As a result, concentrations of some POPs, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), in the blood of people in certain arctic regions continue to be higher than in general populations of North America and Europe. The Arctic is the home of many Indigenous peoples who rely on a traditional subsistence diet that includes a high proportion of lipid-rich foods such as fish and marine mammals; thus, they may be chronically exposed to dangerous levels of POPs. Because POPs are often endocrine disruptors, carcinogenic, and/or neurotoxic, exposures present important public health concerns for Arctic Indigenous Peoples. My dissertation research focused on health risks posed by FUD sites on Sivuqaq (St. Lawrence Island) and Unalaska Island, Alaska. These islands were used extensively by the U.S. military during WWII and the Cold War, and FUD sites on the islands may contribute to health disparities reported by residents, including high incidence of cancers, thyroid diseases, and reproductive disorders. My dissertation research on Sivuqaq followed a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach and utilized sentinel fishes living near two FUD sites to examine contaminant concentrations and health effects at multiple levels of biological organization. My results demonstrate that FUD site contamination continues to pose a health risk to local wildlife and Sivuqaq residents despite large-scale remediation efforts. I found that PCB and Hg concentrations in a subsistence fish collected near the Northeast Cape FUD site exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory guidelines for safe consumption of fish. I found differential expression of genes related to ribosomal and metabolic functions in sentinel fish collected near Sivuqaq FUD sites. At the Gambell FUD site, I demonstrated that ninespine stickleback exposed to FUD site contamination exhibit suppressed gonadal maturation and two distinct liver phenotypes, indicating that some fish may be more resistant to POP toxicity. On Unalaska Island, I modelled distributions of contaminants to identify hotspots of contamination at FUD sites remediated by the Army Corps of Engineers. I found that contaminant concentrations remain above state cleanup thresholds at more than half of Unalaska FUD sites and that the City of Unalaska is a pollution hotspot. Collectively, the results of my dissertation research demonstrate that Alaskan FUD sites continue to serve as point sources of pollution and potentiate the risk of disease for local wildlife and rural communities living near these sites

A lexical transducer for North Slope Iñupiaq

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2011This thesis describes the creation and evaluation of software designed to analyze and generate North Slope Iñupiaq words. Given a complete lñupiaq word as input, it attempts to identify the word's stem and suffixes, including the grammatical category and any inflectional information contained in the word. Given a stem and list of suffixes as input, it attempts to produce the corresponding Iñupiaq word, applying phonological processes as necessary. Innovations in the implementation of this software include Iñupiaq-specific formats for specifying lexical data, including a table-based format for specifying inflectional suffixes in paradigms; a treatment of phonologically-conditioned irregular allomorphy which leverages the pattern-recognition capabilities of the xfst programming language; and an idiom for composing morphographemic rules together in xfst which captures the state of the software each time a new rule is added, maximizing feedback during software compilation and facilitating troubleshooting. In testing, the software recognized 81.2% of all word tokens (78.3% of unique word types) and guessed at the morphology of an additional 16.8% of tokens (19.4% of types). Analyses of recognized words were largely accurate; a heuristic for identifying accurate parses is proposed. Most guesses were at least partly inaccurate. Improvements and applications are proposed.National Science Foundation (Award 0534217