This is a joint project between Miyo Wahkohtowin Education, now part of Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission (MESC), Maskwacîs, AB, and Alberta Language Technology Lab (ALTLab) at the University of Alberta, which was started in 2014. The objectives of this project were to 1) record careful, isolated pronunciatons of each word in the Maskwacîs Cree dictionary by multiple speakers of Cree as their first language (both women and men); 2) fill in lexical gaps and record these as well; and 3) record example sentences for as many of these words as possible.

The first pass of going through the entire Maskwacîs Cree Dictionary was completed in May 2018, culminating in over 300 two-hour recording sessions, each with 2-4 Cree speakers from Maskwacîs. Since then, the audio snippets of the careful pronunciations of the Cree words and sentences have been extracted from these recordings, for incorporation in itwêwina and are currently being validated by fluent Cree-speaking MESC employees and Elders. A detailed description of the project can be found in Towards a Spoken Dictionary of Maskwacîs Cree, by Littlechild and others (2018).

The altogether close to 150 thousand individual Cree word and sentence tokens (for over 20 thousand types), representing multiple pronunciations by several speakers, are already publicly available in our on-line dictionary: itwêwina and our Speech-Database.

Images of the recording sessions in Maskwacîs (in the Sohki House 2014-2017 and in the old Ermineskin Band Office 2017-2018) are provided below (clicking the thumbnail gives a full-size image with further details). Information on the individual Cree speakers is available through this link.

(Copyright for all images is held jointly by MESC and ALTLab.)