Oklahoma Breath of Life

American Indian language program receives $90K grant

By Darla SlipkLast summer, Hopper attended an intensive, weeklong program called Oklahoma Breath of Life—Silent no More. The workshop, hosted at the University of Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, was designed to give participants the tools they need to help revitalize American Indian languages that are endangered.

Organizers have received a $90,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue the program.University helps American Indians learn to save their languages

The Breath of Life project is a joint effort by experts from the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Oklahoma in which linguists mentor American Indians so they can better recover endangered languages.

By Diane SmithFields is a participant in the Breath of Life project—a joint effort by experts from the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Oklahoma—in which linguists mentor American Indians so they can better recover endangered languages.

It is modeled after a project at the University of California, Berkeley.

"We are growing field linguists," said Colleen Fitzgerald, associate professor and chairwoman of UT Arlington's Linguistics Department. "We are transferring knowledge to community members so they can teach their own languages."And:Besides training American Indian community members to be linguists on the ground, UT Arlington will be working to create linguistic databases that will ultimately enable the creation of online dictionaries and collections of texts in various languages, Fitzgerald said.

Each community will have a database which will also be stored in a repository at the Noble museum.