By Kate Rix

In a temperature-controlled room in Dwinelle Hall’s basement, almost a dozen gray metal cabinets hold paper notes from decades of field work in California’s endangered native languages: a speckled box of index cards that make up the only comparative dictionary of the Chumash languages, yellowed notebooks detailing Eastern Pomo vocabulary and manuscripts recording early research into the languages of the northern Sacramento valley.

Some 150 linear feet of material in all, this is the archive of Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. Established more than 50 years ago, the Survey’s collection documents the indigenous languages of the Americas, from Alaska to Peru, with a focus on California, the Southwestern United States, and Mexico.

Part of the Survey’s paper collection is now available online. Field recordings from about 90 languages of the Americas are also available at the Berkeley Language Center.

Digitization is critical to the preservation of these written and recorded archives. But it is more than that. It also makes new kinds of analysis possible.

“The Survey digitization project, when it is finished, will enable the great-grandchildren of an elder speaker recorded by a Berkeley linguist in 1960 to listen to that recording,” says Andrew Garrett, professor of linguistics and director of the Survey, “while simultaneously reading the contemporaneous transcription the linguist made. This can happen at the user’s computer wherever they live, in a class they are teaching, or while they are communicating by email with today’s linguists about what they hear and read.”

Ultimately, Garrett hopes to offer users access to integrated audio and visual resources, with links between the Language Center’s sound files and the growing collection of scanned paper notes.

Within California alone there are five projects underway with support from Survey resources, documenting endangered languages or working with archival language materials. Three of them — in Kawaiisu, Northern Paiute and Wiyot — actually arose at the initiative of the Indian communities themselves. Two others, in Hupa and Yurok, engage Berkeley faculty, graduate students, and Indian community members in active collaboration.

The Survey’s work in language documentation has roots in the early 20th century.

In 1901 the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber made his way by horseback and canoe into the northwestern corner of California, the rugged, wooded home of the Yurok people. His work studying Yurok narratives and culture involved extensive study of their language, spoken along the salmon-rich Klamath River.

Back in Kroeber’s day, there were some 2,500 fluent speakers of Yurok, a language that is related to the Algonquian family of Native American languages. Today there are fewer than ten.

“People have always felt an urgency in documenting California’s native languages,” says Garrett. “With that urgency in mind there is still quite a lot of documentary work to be done.”

With 80 to 90 distinct indigenous languages belonging to 20 major groups, 200 years ago California was the most linguistically diverse region in the western hemisphere. Though the Yurok Tribe is the largest in California, Yurok is just one of about 50 native languages still spoken in the state.

Garrett travels once a month into the same terrain where Kroeber worked nearly a century ago to record the speech of elders there and to help teach younger Yurok people how to teach the language to their children.

“The best Yurok speaker today is in his nineties,” Garrett says, “but there has been a huge revival of interest in the language in the past couple of decades. While Yurok has not more than half a dozen fluent speakers left, the language is taught in every school in the area. Hundreds of kids have immense vocabularies and handfuls of people can carry on conversations in the language.

“The Tribe has emphasized training teachers in Yurok,” Garrett adds. “Whether that will translate into parents raising kids speaking the language at home, we don’t know. That is really the only thing that will truly perpetuate the language.”

Another benefit of digitization is the widening of public access to the Center’s resources.

“Every piece of information we can make available now will be useful to future scholars and the heritage language community,” Garrett says. “It is difficult for many people to come to Berkeley to use our paper resources.”

Having begun the process of digitizing their resources means that anyone interested in the preservation of an endangered language may access tools and information without making a trip to campus. The Yurok community for example, in spite of its physical isolation to this day, has made use of the Survey’s database to keep the use of the Yurok language active. Garrett frequently corresponds with Yurok language teachers and education staff about word usage and sentence patterns for classroom and public use.

The work continues with the same, if not stronger urgency of the past. Four of the best Yurok speakers died last year, Garrett notes, which makes the Survey’s work all the more important.