The California Language Archive (CLA) at the University of California, Berkeley, holds one of the nation’s largest repositories of Indigenous American language materials. For most of the archive’s history, however, these materials were largely inaccessible to tribal members. With NEH funding, the CLA has been able to digitize most of its collection, making it much easier for tribal communities to make use of those materials in their language revitalization efforts.
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Among its collections, the CLA houses ethnographic and linguistic documentation that was recorded in the first half of the twentieth century, and which is consequently very fragile. Chief among these is a series of sound recordings taken on wax cylinders in the early twentieth century. They feature songs and tales in Indigenous Californian languages that have since become endangered. Until recently, the cylinders’ age and fragility meant that many of the sounds that were encoded in the wax had been lost to history. However, NEH funding allowed researchers to scan the cylinders and reproduce the recordings digitally, ensuring that the songs and tales inscribed there are now able to be used by their home communities as well as preserved for future generations. In addition to the wax cylinders, the CLA is digitizing field notes and other documentation, which will also help in language revitalization efforts.
NEH support also helped create the digital infrastructure that is necessary to make these materials accessible to those who need it. The CLA website, as well as re-indexing efforts that made the archive more intuitive (for example, organizing materials by language rather than by the name of the collector) have been transformative for Native communities seeking to revitalize their languages.