Indigenous languages of North American

Graduate / Professional

This course explores the indigenous languages of North America, including their histories, linguistic properties, cultural settings, and the key social issues facing them in the twenty-first century. North American indigenous languages show remarkable diversity in sound, structure, and social context, and each embodies a unique view of what it means to be human. Many different linguistic aspects of North American languages are discussed, including the sound systems; person, number, gender and classification; the expression of time and space; and specialized grammatical phenomena like polysynthesis and reduplication. Social contexts of language include performance, speech games, language change, language endangerment, and government policies. Students investigate and report on patterns and phenomena in a specific language, culminating in a final project and presentation that summarizes their research over the term. More generally, they become familiar with basic concepts for studying human languages, appreciate the great diversity of indigenous languages in North America, talk with people who speak and study these languages, learn why and how these languages are endangered, and discover how indigenous communities are working to keep their languages alive. MW 9am-10:15am