The 2017 National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages

Miami University, Oxford OH

Investigators

Abstract

The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American Languages. All Native American languages are endangered, and over 120 of these languages have gone silent, which means there are no remaining fluent first language speakers. Experts recognize around 7,000 languages worldwide, and they estimate at least half will fall silent by the end of this century. Human language is highly complex and scientists have thus far only scratched the surface in analyzing and understanding the scientific diversity represented in the grammars of the individual 7,000 languages. Because the number of languages far exceeds the number of trained language scientists, one challenge is to train more linguists. Another challenge is reversing language endangerment, thus staunching the loss of languages, cultures and knowledge. Opportunities within linguistics that use informal science learning in linguistics, such as short workshops, conferences, and other training, have proven effective in addressing both challenges. One such project, the Breath of Life archival model, has been successful in engaging Native American citizen scientists to work with archival language documentation in repositories in California, Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. This project will fund the 2017 National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages (National BoL), the fourth of its kind since 2011. Broader impacts include the training of Native American citizen scientists to work on their own tribe's language and the training of linguistics graduate students, who serve as mentors and learn from their experiences how to produce documentation that is both better and more relevant and useful to community language efforts. The general public, other tribal members and interested scholars will also benefit from access to the newly digitized archival materials from the Smithsonian Institution's holdings created as part of this project. Co-hosted by the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives and National Museum of the American Indian, and the Library of Congress, the National BoL will last two weeks and introduce linguistics and the language sciences. Participants are grouped by their heritage language, with each group assigned an academically trained linguist for one-on-one mentoring in the analysis of archival materials in that language. Ultimately, these efforts by citizen scientists will increase their linguistic understanding of their languages, to support reclamation and further investigation of the languages. The National BoL will train citizen scientists from some 15 language communities, bringing the cumulative number of languages investigated in these national workshops to over 70. By engaging community members in research, this workshop broadens the participation of Native Americans in the social sciences by investigating aspects of language that directly benefit community goals. Importantly, the 2017 National BoL will also use professional evaluators to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the extent to which training targeted at capacity building in archival research enables community members to address critical needs in sustaining languages and continue to contribute to the language sciences. Finally, the informal science learning environment provided by the National BoL has the potential to show how it facilitates novel discoveries in linguistics as researchers engage with archival language documentation, while also training new cohorts of academic and community linguists.