Collaborative Research: Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project

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According to National Geographic's Enduring Voices: Saving Disappearing Languages, Oklahoma is one of the linguistic hotspots in the world: a place with high language diversity but where the languages are severely endangered and have very little documentation. Although Oklahoma has the highest Native language diversity in the US, all of the thirty-nine languages are endangered. A successful pilot Breath of Life: Silent No More Workshop (BOL) was held at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma in 2010. BOL workshops pair participants from communities that no longer have any fluent speakers with a linguist who mentors them in linguistic analysis and methodology. The curriculum is an ideal introduction to the use of archival materials and to the nature of linguistic investigation and documentation. The workshops also foster long-term interaction between linguists and community members, and for the natural development and progression of language skills and documentary work for both the linguists and the community members. This collaborative proposal has three main goals. First, it seeks to plan and conduct a six-day, two-tiered (beginner and second year levels) Oklahoma Breath of Life in May 2012. This will reinforce the original mentor-mentee partnerships with three communities (Osage, Otoe, and Natchez) and provide for seven more. Partnerships like these lead to the production of grammars, dictionaries, teaching materials, and documented new speakers. Secondly, the OKBOL Workshop will develop language databases for these ten languages from existing archived materials. There is so much more data in linguistic archives than the original collectors were ever able to analyze or publish. This grant will make dormant texts, grammatical elicitations, and word lists usable and accessible to heritage communities and researchers. Third, the unique introduction of databasing in early stages of linguistics and language renewal teaching will be used to solidify and test the connection between language revitalization efforts and the creation of new linguistic documentation. By drawing on the strength of linguistics as an empirical science and using the latest digital tools, this project has the potential to transform the science of documenting languages, as well as how linguists are trained.The activities supported by this grant will provide a testing ground for the hypothesis that language revitalization training does result in new language documentation of understudied, supposedly lost languages, as well as the hypothesis that both humanistic and scientific goals can be met in a language revitalization project. Finally, Native American language reclamation projects like this one help to provide an important part of the historical documentation of the United States for all its citizens.