CNAIS Faculty Executive Board member Andrew Cowell and doctoral student Irina Wagner are part of an effort to save the language with the Arapaho Language Project. They fear Arapaho will fade away after the fluent elderly speakers are gone.
“The Arapaho language is highly endangered,” said Cowell, chair of the Linguistics Department. “There are only about 200 people who speak it. Of the fluent speakers, no one is younger than 60.”The Arapaho Language Project is a website created by students and faculty in the Department of Linguistics to support the revival of the Arapaho language and to serve as a resource for learners. The website is rich in content, containing language lessons, a dictionary, a pronunciation guide, bilingual curriculum materials and examples of the language being used in everyday life. Read the full CU Boulder Today article.
Northern Arapaho Chiefs
The language is interwoven into the fabric of the Colorado land and culture. While the Arapaho lived mainly on the plains of Colorado, they spent time hunting in the Rocky Mountain National Park area. Several places in the state get their names from Arapaho, such as Kawuneeche Valley in Rocky Mountain National Park, from Arapaho "koo'ohwuunii," meaning "coyote river," and the Never Summer Mountains, from Arapaho "niiciibiicei'i," meaning "they are never summery." CU Linguistics & NAIS Grad Student, Irina Wagner