Andrew Cowell talks with Arapaho speakers Alonzo Moss, Sr. and Edward Willow about an Arapaho place name near Grand Lake, CO. Including place names in the database has been a key part of the project. Photo by Sara Wiles, Lander, WY.
Arapaho is an endangered language that is primarily spoken by two communities: the Southern Arapaho in Oklahoma and the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming. The Arapaho Lexical Database and Dictionary seeks to document and preserve this language by creating a comprehensive online searchable dictionary of Arapaho words and phrases. NEH funding through the Documenting Endangered Languages program has provided the project the financial support it needed to become a valuable resource for language revitalization in the tribal communities it serves.
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A story told in Arapaho. Narratives like this one have been transcribed and uploaded onto the database to serve as language learning tools.
The database currently has about 35,000 individual entries. These include historic Arapaho words drawn from archival sources as well as common words used in everyday life. They also include less-common words that may only be used once or twice a year. For Andrew Cowell, a linguist working on the project, recording these less-common words is just as important as documenting everyday language: “If you only document the core of a language, you lose its more interesting, more distinctive forms.” In addition to dictionary entries for individual words, the database includes a textual database of more than 100,000 sentences of spoken Arapaho, drawn from speeches, stories, and other sources, that have been transcribed and made searchable. Such a repository of in-context language use is invaluable for language learners.
Andrew Cowell works with Arapaho elders in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, to document Arapaho place names. Photo by Sara Wiles, Lander, WY.
Andrew Cowell works with Arapaho speakers Richard Antelope, Alonzo Moss, Sr. and Edward Willow to document Arapaho plant names in Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo by Sara Wiles, Lander, WY.
NEH funding allowed the project to expand far beyond its original parameters. Funds allowed Cowell to expand the database and spend more time documenting language use in Northern Arapaho communities in Wyoming. The grant also provided the funds to hire a graduate student, who was able to transcribe spoken-word data and make it searchable, and to log archival Arapaho sources into the database, making them accessible to the Arapaho themselves—often for the first time. As a result of these efforts, the text database is large enough to support machine learning; eventually, it will allow database users to search for words even if they are misspelled or have a prefix or suffix attached. This will make the database much more intuitive to use and, as a result, help further its goal of Arapaho language revitalization.
