Due to historical forces, Oklahoma has an unusually high concentration of Native American tribes, originally from all over the continent. The range of languages spoken there is thus especially rich. The Native American Languages collections at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH) cover languages, primarily from Oklahoma, that are severely endangered and under-represented in libraries and archives. With NSF support, Dr. Mary Linn plans to expand the documentation of Native languages and increase the accessibility and usablility of existing and newly created collections. This will be accomplished both with direct curatorial effort and through training Native language speakers and educators. Two series of three workshops will be given: 1) Best practices in audio/video recording, 2) Digitization and archival practices for audio/video collections, and 3) Documentation: From recordings to classroom use. Further, for tribes who have no or very few speakers, a separate ?Breath of Life? workshop will train participants in the use of existing linguistic and audio materials for language documentation and learning. These workshops will help tribal language programs and archives in their own documenting and archiving practices as well as familiarize the participants to the SNOMNH Native American Languages collections, services, and programs.
The collection makes possible the production of teaching curriculum and materials for the whose communities are trying to maintain them. It also provides data for linguistic research in phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and historical and comparative linguistics. With the training workshops, the SNOMNH will promote documentation in language revitalization efforts. Project staff will work closely with local Native communities in order to make the holdings as accessible and as usable as possible in an effort to encourage all Native people to take full advantage of existing material. This will enable those less familiar with archives and academic venues to use these resources as part of their language revitalization and maintenance efforts. The training programs will also help partner tribal-based language programs and archives with their academic partners to help contribute to the evolving standards in documentation and archiving audio/visual data.
