Native American Languages

Collaboration among contemporary Native American communities and local public schools is vital for nurturing Native languages. Although public schools cannot bear the entire burden, Native-language education will remain on the margins without their support. Using case studies of school districts on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Crossing Mountains provides important insights about integrating Native-language learning into public education. Phyllis Ngai argues that carefully designed and inclusive Native-language programs can benefit communities and students regardless of ethnic identity by providing for language-revitalization and promoting intercultural competence.

An overview of the application of technology for language revitalization. Many developing technologies such as new keyboards, machine translation, and data management have the potential to revolutionise the documentation, analysis and revitalisation of endangered languages.

Indigenous Languages and the Promise of Archives discusses how The American Philosophical Society is exploring new applications of materials in its library to partner on collaborative projects that assist the cultural and linguistic revitalization movements within Native communities. The Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at the American Philosophical Society brought together this volume of historical and contemporary case studies highlighting the importance of archival materials for the revitalization of Indigenous languages. Essays written by archivists, historians, anthropologists, knowledge-keepers, and museum professionals, cover topics critical to language revitalization work; they tackle long-standing debates about ownership, access, and control of Indigenous materials stored in repositories; and they suggest strategies for how to decolonize collections in the service of community-based priorities.

Since the founding of the first tribal colleges over 50 years ago, language revitalization has been an integral part of every tribal college or university's mission. This new edited volume compiles an array of articles, essays, reports, and speeches that showcase the great efforts being made to preserve, protect, and revitalize Indigenous languages at tribal colleges across the United States. The first book of its kind, Language Revitalization at Tribal Colleges and Universities offers a chronological overvieww of preservation and revitalization efforts, revealing how programming and thinking have evolved over the past 25 years.

Telling Stories in the Face of Danger presents case studies from various North American communities that show tribal stories as vehicles of moral development, healing, and the construction of identity. Several essays presented here describe successful efforts to maintain, revitalize, and renew narrative traditions or to adapt them to new institutions, such as schools. Others consider less successful efforts, noting conflicts among older and younger tribal members or differences between academic and traditional language expertise or between insiders and outsiders.

Since Europeans encountered Native Americans, problems relating to language and text translation have been an issue. Translators needed to create tools for translation, such as dictionaries. The fact that many Native languages do not share the same structures or classes of words as European languages has always made translation difficult. Translating cultural values and perceptions into idioms of another culture makes this process more difficult. In Born in the Blood, Brian Swann gathers some of the scholars in the field of Native American translation to address the problems and concerns surrounding the process of translating Native American languages and texts. The essays in this collection address important questions as, what should be translated? how should it be translated? who should do translation? and even, should the translation of Native literature be done at all? This volume also includes translations of songs and stories.

The author of this study explores the nature of acculturation in the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans. Specifically, he examines how Native American languages adjusted to the introduction of foreign objects and concepts after 1492, discerning patterns of linguistics.

Beliefs and feelings about language vary across Native American cultural groups and are a part of the processes of language shift and language death. This volume samples the language ideologies of a wide range of Native American communities to show their role in sociocultural transformation. The authors, including members of indigenous communities who participate in language renewal efforts, discuss Native Americans' conscious language ideologies and also the relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use in community practice. The chapters discuss contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity. And although they portray obvious variation in attitudes toward language across communities, they also reveal commonalities.

This user-friendly guide - covering Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas - provides fascinating information about the meaning and origins of southwestern placenames. With its unique regional approach and compact design, the handbook is especially suitable for curious travelers. Entries give the state and county, along with all available information on pronunciation, the name of the language from which the name derives, the name's literal meaning, and relevant history.

The Native American language family called Athabaskan has received increasing attention from linguists and educators. The linguistic chapters in this volume focus on syntax and semantics, but also involve morphology, phonology, and historical linguistics. Included is a discussion of whether religion and secular issues can be separated in Navajo classrooms.