Digital linguists work to save the Arapaho language

Arapaho is one of the many an Indigenous languages that are severely at risk of disappearing. According to the United Nations, 4 in 10 Indigenous languages are currently at risk due to aging populations and ongoing discrimination against native speakers. For Arapaho, the population of native speakers of the language rooted in the Great Plains is aging. In an effort to fend off its disappearance, a team at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder and the Northern Arapaho Language and Culture Commission are deploying digital tools including databases and language education projects. 

“Arapaho was the native language of Boulder, so when I got hired at CU I decided, well, I’ll look into Arapaho,” Andrew Cowell, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of linguistics and faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, said in a statement. “I started looking into Arapaho more and more and doing more work on the side and eventually decided to switch departments into linguistics so I could focus all my energy on indigenous languages.”

Cowell has been working on a free online lexical database, with over 20,000 entries, akin to a dictionary, and a text database with over 100,000 Arapaho sentences. These sentences include several natural conversations and stories that the team has recorded throughout the years. Cowell has transcribed and translated the recordings, and the sentences are accompanied with a linguistic analysis. Altogether, their data represents close to 100 native speakers. 

While the text database is unpublished, it has already underpinned important projects aiming to preserve Arapaho and make learning the language more accessible.  

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“We’ve gotten a list of the frequency of all the nouns in the language and all the verbs,” Cowell explained. “We ranked those, and it allowed us to produce a really small student dictionary where we only included words that occurred around 40 times or more. It means (students) don’t have to flip through rare and uncommon words they’re unlikely to be really interested in as initial learners.”

Cowell and his colleagues are also working on a curriculum to teach Arapaho. The language was traditionally learned at home and not in an academic setting, so the team needed to develop the educational structure from scratch. 

“It’s all based on looking at the text we’ve collected and looking at the frequency of certain kinds of grammatical features that occur,” Cowell explained. “With Arapaho, no one’s really ever tried to teach it as a second language. Now we’re trying to learn it and teach it, and the databases have allowed us to really produce that scaled curriculum.” 

These efforts align with his aim to produce work that will benefit the Indigenous community. In Cowell’s experience, Indigenous communities consider language a vital part of their identity. One of the reasons that the full text database isn’t publicly available is the fear that it will be used or exploited by artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, 5,000 sentences approved by native Arapaho speakers will be published online.