In Breath of Life workshops, linguists help members of
Native American communities
This list of pre-Columbian cultures includes those civilizations and cultures of the Americas which flourished prior to the European colonization of the Americas.
Cultural characteristics
Many pre-Columbian civilizations established permanent o ...
access and use archival material documenting their ancestral languages in the interest of language restoration and revitalization.
This is particularly important for the many communities that no longer have fluent speakers of their languages. They are held biannually in June at
U.C. Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...
and at the
University of Oklahoma in Norman in even-numbered years, and at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in odd-numbered years. The project was initiated in the early 1990s at the
University of California Berkeley, in part by linguist
Leanne Hinton.
Norman, Oklahoma
The Oklahoma Breath of Life, Silent No More Workshop is held at the
Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
Sam, SAM or variants may refer to:
Places
* Sam, Benin
* Sam, Boulkiemdé, Burkina Faso
* Sam, Bourzanga, Burkina Faso
* Sam, Kongoussi, Burkina Faso
* Sam, Iran
* Sam, Teton County, Idaho, United States, a populated place
People and fictio ...
on the campus of the
University of Oklahoma in
Norman, Oklahoma. It has been funded by grants from the "Documenting Endangered Languages" (DEL) program, a joint project of the
National Science Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
The purpose of the workshop is to teach participants how to:
* Find archived language materials
* Read phonetic writing
* Understand how their language works
* Start a database to manage and access their language information
* Begin the process of language and cultural revitalization
* Create fun and interactive teaching materials from old sources
Washington, D.C.
The Breath of Life Institute has been supported by
Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL), a joint program of the
National Science Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Partners include the
National Museum of Natural History, The
National Museum of the American Indian, the
Library of Congress, Th
Endangered Language Fund and
Yale University.
References
Further reading
• Hinton, Leanne (2001). "The Use of Linguistic Archives in Language Revitalization: The Native California Language Restoration Workshop". ''The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice''. {{ISBN, 978-90-04-26172-3.
Language revival
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Native American studies