This material is based on work supported by National Science Foundation grants BCS-0651787 and BCS-0853788 to the University of Alaska Southeast with Ljáaḵkʼ Alice Taff as Principal Investigator and by National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship 266286-19 to Ljáaḵkʼ Alice Taff. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or National Endowment for the Humanities.

Some Tips

• Start and stop continuous playback with the media player's controls.

• Play a single line by clicking on that line's number. To re-activate continuous play, use the media player's controls.

• Use Command+F on a Mac, Control+F on windows, to search for words in the conversation.

• For video conversations, the "picture-in-picture" mode can be useful. This puts the video in a separate window, after which you can shrink the originating video window in your web browser, allowing more text to be seen on-screen.

• Safari on a Mac laptop, iPhone or iPad sometimes produces odd results in single line mode.

Symobls used in the transcription

• {false start}
• (added for clarity)
• [translator/transcriber's note]
• ??? = can’t understand
• «Lingít quotation marks»

Software Used

Time-aligned text for this video was accomplished using ELAN, Versions 6.0 (2020), 6.1 (2021), and 6.3 (2022) Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan

We use SLEXIL to render ELAN XML output as interactive web pages. Pronounced "sluck-HAIL", SLEXIL means daylight in the Lushootseed language, for which it was originally developed. The name may also be understod as an acronym: Software Linking ELAN XML to Illuminated Language.

SLEXIL is documented here, maintained on github, can be run interactively on the web, and is actively supported by Paul Shannon who welcomes your feedback.

To compare your pronunciation to that of the Tlingit elders, click on the microphone icon located at the right top of the main page. This opens the "RECORD YOURSELF" window in which you can record your own pronunciation of any line of interest.

Begin by clicking on the number of a line of an elder speaking. It may help to do this repeatedly, LISTENING more than reading, absorbing the sounds of their speech. (In English, we donʼt talk the same way a printed word is spelled. The same is true for Tlingít.)

When you're ready to record yourself, click RECORD in the "RECORD YOURSELF" window, then STOP, then PLAY. You can keep recording yourself with the same line and hear your pronunciation improving!

Usage notes from Alice Taff

Using a Macbook Air M4, Sequoia 15.5, the record-self works fine:

1. with Firefox 140.0.2
2. with Safari 18.5
3. with Chrome 138.0.7204.158