Sahaptin

IP Oregon

Sahaptin is a Plateau Penutian language still spoken in Oregon and adjacent states. By the most optimistic estimates, Sahaptin has 125 speakers, but all fully fluent speakers are over 60 years of age.

This project will build on ongoing projects with the Sahaptin tribe at the University of Oregon, to create an annotated corpus of all previously published Sahaptin texts and a subset of recently recorded Sahaptin text. It is especially crucial for us to work with the older speakers now, both to record additional texts and to analyze older texts, as the speech of the middle-aged generation of Umatilla Sahaptin speakers differs from that of their Elders with regard to exactly the grammatical feature objective to our project.