Putting the languages on the internet means that communities have to make complicated decisions about what to share and when.
An article in Slate about language revitalization in the digital era. Excerpt:Â
At a recent conference called Breath of Life 2.0, held at Miami University of Ohio, participants explored the possibilities and pitfalls of archival databases. For the people involved in language revitalization work, whether theyâre awakening a dormant language (one that no longer has fluent speakers) or trying to prevent an existing language from losing all its speakers, one of the major obstacles is a lack of digital resources.
Jerome Viles experienced that firsthand. An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and part of the Southwest Oregon Dene Languages Project team, Viles helps organize archival materials produced by linguists and community members over the past 100 years. First, his community had to findthe documents, which were scattered in institutions across the country. But the other problem was organizing and reconciling them. For instance, some records of language may have been written by French Jesuits who came to North America to convert Native American people. But even if three Jesuits worked with the same tribe, they could all have different spelling systems. Then there are audio recordings from the 1800s and 1900s, plus ethnographic material collected by anthropologists.
What Vilesâ group and many others needed was a way to collect and compare thousands of words across multiple generations and several dialects. And thatâs where the Indigenous Language Digital Archive came in. ILDA is a database built by engineers at Miami University in collaboration with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma (which built an earlier form of the database specifically for its own language revitalization work). At the Breath of Life 2.0 conference, participants learned how to navigate the software and move their documents into one big digital space. By the end of the five days, a few surprising discoveries had emerged. Community members from the Northern Paiute, working on the Numu language, were tickled to find seven different ways to say âour husband.â
âI was getting a kick out of that,â said Nicholas Cortez. âI was like, whereâs this âourâ coming from?â
Read the whole thing.Â
