Texts in Transition: Languages and Linguistics of the Native West

Amy Rose Deal
Linguistics
UC Santa Cruz

Maziar Toosarvandani
Linguistics
UC Santa Cruz

Western North America is the ancestral home of tribal groups speaking dozens of individual languages, representing more than 5 major language families. UC researchers have long played a leading role in documenting these languages, producing dictionaries, grammars, and collections of narratives. As many tribal groups have shifted toward English as the language of daily interaction, many indigenous languages have come to exist primarily if not exclusively in the form of such written documentation. Documentary texts have thus come to play an outsize role in scholarship on indigenous languages both within and beyond the academy. This working group brought researchers together around the challenges and opportunities afforded by documentary texts in exploring languages and linguistics of the Native West. The group explored the way their roles as linguistic, literary, and pedagogical resources have transitioned over time and may inform ongoing documentation projects.