California Language Archive is now live

We are pleased to announce that the Audio Archive of Linguistic Field Recordings and the Survey of California and Other Indigenous Languages have merged their databases and are now accessible through the portal site California Language Archive.

The Audio Archive contains 1700+ hours of recordings of stories, songs/chants, and elicitation of linguistic data in 221 collections accessioned from the 1950’s to the present day. The Survey’s holdings include field notes, unpublished manuscripts (grammars and dictionaries), letters and photographs, currently in the process of being scanned and made available via pdf files. The new CLA interface provides access to both sets of materials and features a geographic or linguistic orientation to the source material. We believe this new portal will facilitate access to source materials for academics and Native Americans seeking to learn their heritage languages. In the future the CLA hopes to include access to the audio collections housed at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology and to the documents related to Native Americans at the Bancroft Library.

Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics at UCB and curator of both SCOIL’s and the BLC’s archives, supervised a team of graduate students including Amy Campbell, Hannah Haynie, Justin Spence, and John Sylak, with technical help from Ronald Sprouse, to make this project a reality.