Center for American Indian Languages

Last updated
University of Utah Center for American Indian Languages
Type Public
Established 2004
Location Salt Lake City , Utah , USA
Campus Map
Website www.cail.utah.edu

The Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL) is a research and outreach arm of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah. Its mission is to assist community members in the maintenance and revitalization (where possible) of endangered languages, to document these languages, and to train students to do this sort of work.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.

University of Utah public coeducational space-grant research university in Salt Lake City, Utah

The University of Utah is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. As the state's flagship university, the university offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 92 graduate degree programs. The university is classified among "R-1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity" with "selective" admissions. Graduate studies include the S.J. Quinney College of Law and the School of Medicine, Utah's first medical school. As of Fall 2015, there are 23,909 undergraduate students and 7,764 graduate students, for an enrollment total of 31,673.

Contents

History

The Center was founded in 2004 by the well-known Americanist and historical linguist Lyle Campbell. It is located in the Fort Douglas part of the University of Utah campus.

Indigenous languages of the Americas languages spoken by Indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas

Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska, Nunavut, and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families, as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages.

Historical linguistics, also called diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:

  1. to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
  2. to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families
  3. to develop general theories about how and why language changes
  4. to describe the history of speech communities
  5. to study the history of words, i.e. etymology

Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

A library, which contains over 3,000 books and journals on languages of the Americas, is part of the center. [1]

Shoshone language program for youth

A summer Shoshone/Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program (SYLAP), held at the University of Utah's Center for American Indian Languages since 2009 has been featured on NPR's Weekend Edition program. [2] [3] [4] Shoshoni youth serve as interns, assisting with digitization of Shoshoni language recordings and documentation from the Wick R. Miller collection, so that the materials can be made available for tribal members. [2]

<i>Weekend Edition</i>

Weekend Edition is a set of American radio news magazine programs produced and distributed by National Public Radio (NPR). It is the weekend counterpart to the NPR radio program Morning Edition. It consists of Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday, each of which airs for two hours, from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM Eastern time, with refeeds until 2:00 PM. Weekend Edition Saturday is hosted by Scott Simon, while Weekend Edition Sunday has been hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro since January 8, 2017.

Shoshoni, also written as Shoshoni-Gosiute and Shoshone is a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken in the Western United States by the Shoshone people. Shoshoni is primarily spoken in the Great Basin, in areas of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.

Closure of center in 2012

In August 2012, the University of Utah announced plans to close the Center for American Indian Languages. "The College of Humanities instead will concentrate language-preservation efforts on Utah's tribal tongues," according to one article. [5] This closure, said to be for focusing efforts on the language of Utah tribes, "has shocked many in the language conservation world. [6] Linguists, including Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian have expressed serious concern about the negative impact on efforts to preserve indigenous languages throughout the Americas. [5] [7]

Language documentation is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. Language documentation also provides a firmer foundation for linguistic analysis in that it creates a citable set of materials in the language on which claims about the structure of the language can be based.

Robert Hale Ives Goddard III (1941–) is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is widely considered the leading expert on the Algonquian languages and the larger Algic language family.

Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers administered by the United States government

The Smithsonian Institution, founded on August 10, 1846 "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge," is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. The institution is named after its founding donor, British scientist James Smithson. Originally organized as the "United States National Museum," that name ceased to exist as an administrative entity in 1967.

Related Research Articles

Bear River Massacre

The Bear River Massacre, or the Battle of Bear River or Massacre at Boa Ogoi, took place in present-day Idaho on January 29, 1863.

The Shoshone or Shoshoni are a Native American tribe with four large cultural/linguistic divisions:

Goshute ethnic group

The Goshutes are a tribe of Western Shoshone Native Americans. There are two federally recognized Goshute tribes today:

Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin Native Americans of the northern Great Basin, Snake River Plain, and upper Colorado River basin

The Indigenous Peoples of the Great Basin are Native Americans of the northern Great Basin, Snake River Plain, and upper Colorado River basin. The "Great Basin" is a cultural classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas and a cultural region located between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, in what is now Nevada, and parts of Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. The Great Basin region at the time of European contact was ~400,000 sq mi (1,000,000 km2). There is very little precipitation in the Great Basin area which affects the lifestyles and cultures of the inhabitants.

Pocatello (Shoshone leader) Shoshone leader

Chief Pocatello was a leader of the Northern Shoshone, a Native American people of the Great Basin in western North America. He led attacks against early settlers during a time of increasing strife between settlers and Native Americans. After making peace with the United States, he moved his people to their present reservation in Idaho and led the Shoshone during their struggle to survive following their relocation. The city of Pocatello is named in his honor.

Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic comes from the cognate word in all Numic languages for "person." For example, in the three Central Numic languages and the two Western Numic languages it is. In Kawaiisu it is and in Colorado River, and.

Western Shoshone Great Basin native american people

The Western Shoshone comprise several Shoshone tribes that are indigenous to the Great Basin and have lands identified in the Treaty of Ruby Valley 1863. They resided in Idaho, Nevada, California, and Utah. The tribes are very closely related culturally to the Paiute, Goshute, Bannock, Ute, and Timbisha tribes.

The Skull Valley Indian Reservation is located in Tooele County, Utah, United States, approximately 45 miles (72 km) southwest of Salt Lake City. It is inhabited by the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians of Utah, a federally recognized tribe. The population includes approximately 31 people in 7 households and is characterized by a high incidence of poverty.

The Timbisha are a Native American tribe federally recognized as the Death Valley Timbisha Shoshone Band of California. They are known as the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and are located in south central California, near the Nevada border. As of the 2010 Census the population of the Village was 124. The older members still speak the ancestral language, also called Timbisha.

Ibapah, Utah Unincorporated community in Utah, United States

Ibapah is a small unincorporated community in far western Tooele County, Utah, United States, near the Nevada state line.

<i>Oxybasis rubra</i> species of plant

Oxybasis rubra(syn. Chenopodium rubrum), common names red goosefoot or coastblite goosefoot, is a member of the genus Oxybasis, a segregate of Chenopodium. It is native to North America and Eurasia. It is an annual plant.

Washakie, Utah Ghost town in Utah, United States

Washakie is a ghost town in far northern Box Elder County, Utah, United States. Lying some 3 miles (4.8 km) southeast of Portage, it was established in 1880 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the settlement of the Northwestern Shoshone. The Washakie Indian Farm was home to the main body of this Native American band through most of the 20th century. By the mid-1970s, Washakie's residents were gone and the property sold to a private ranching operation. Today the tribal reservation consists of a small tract containing the Washakie cemetery, and the tribe is seeking to acquire more of the surrounding land. The old LDS chapel in Washakie is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Eastern Shoshone

Eastern Shoshone are Shoshone who primarily live in Wyoming and in the northeast corner of the Great Basin where Utah, Idaho and Wyoming meet and are in the Great Basin classification of Indigenous People. They lived in the Rocky Mountains during the 1805 Lewis and Clark Expedition and adopted Plains horse culture in contrast to Western Shoshone that maintained a Great Basin culture.

Wick R. Miller (1932–1994) was an American linguist most well known for his work on Keresan languages and Uto-Aztecan, especially Shoshoni and Guarijio. He worked both on synchronic description and historical linguistics.

The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians is a federally recognized tribe of Chumash, an indigenous people of California, in Santa Barbara. Their name for themselves is Samala.

Northern Shoshone

Northern Shoshone are Shoshone of the Snake River Plain of southern Idaho and the northeast of the Great Basin where Idaho, Wyoming and Utah meet. They are culturally affiliated with the Bannock people and are in the Great Basin classification of Indigenous People.

The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation is a federally recognized tribe of Shoshone people, located in Box Elder County, Utah. They are also known as the Northwestern Band of Shoshoni Indians.

Brigham D. Madsen American historian

Brigham Dwaine Madsen was a historian of indigenous peoples of the American West, of the people of Utah and surrounding states, and of Mormonism. He was a professor at the University of Utah.

References

  1. "CAIL Library and Computer Lab". University of Utah. 2009. Retrieved 2010-08-03.
  2. 1 2 "Shoshone/Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program". Center for American Indian Languages, University of Utah. Retrieved 2012-08-30.
  3. Paul Koepp (2010-07-21). "University of Utah program helps Shoshone youths keep language alive". Deseret News. Retrieved 2012-08-30.
  4. Jenny Brundin (2009-07-18). "Ten Teens Study To Guard Their Native Language". Morning Edition, NPR. Retrieved 2012-08-30.
  5. 1 2 Associated Press. "Linguists' quest to preserve languages in danger after University of Utah closes unique center". The Republic. Columbus, Indiana. Retrieved 2012-10-07.[ permanent dead link ]
  6. Brian Maffly (2012-09-07). "U. of Utah dismantling native language center: Fate of the preservation efforts in question as focus narrows to Utah tribes". Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  7. Brian Maffly (2012-09-17). "University of Utah shifts focus on indigenous languages". The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved 2012-10-07.