Berkeley Breathes Life into Native Languages
Channel: UC Berkeley
Date: 2014-07-21

The UC Berkeley Linguistics Department has led the way in the effort to document and preserve California's native languages. The Breath of Life Workshop for California Indian Languages is a biennial workshop designed for California Indians whose languages have no fluent speakers. The goal is for the participants to access, understand, and do research on materials on their languages, and to use them for language revitalization.

With the first linguistics department to be established in North America (in 1901), Berkeley has a rich and distinguished tradition of rigorous linguistic documentation and theoretical innovation, making it an exciting and fulfilling place to carry out linguistic research. Its original mission, due to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the Sanskrit and Dravidian scholar Murray B. Emeneau, was the recording and describing of unwritten languages, especially American Indian languages spoken in California and elsewhere in the United States. The current Department of Linguistics continues this tradition, integrating careful, scholarly documentation with cutting-edge theoretical work in phonetics, phonology and morphology.

Video footage excerpted from the forthcoming documentary, "Breath of LIfe," by Rick Bacigalupi. Edited by Roxanne Makasdjian and Phil Ebiner, UC Berkeley Media Relations

Related New York Times article about UC Berkeley's efforts to revitalize the Yurok language: nyti.ms/1qwSVa4

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