Indigenous languages preserved by UC Berkeley

Rare audio of indigenous languages saved on wax cylinders: Science Nation

(National Science Foundation, Aug. 7, 2017) Non-invasive technology allows researchers to transfer recordings from thousands of decaying wax cylinders.

The many nations spoke many tongues.

Optical scan technology is helping researchers at the University of California at Berkeley preserve audio recordings of 78 Native American California languages, most of which were recorded more than a century ago.

The recordings are on approximately 2,700 wax cylinders which are now barely audible due to issues such as mold. These are the only known sound-recordings for several of these languages, and in many other cases the recordings include unique speech practices and otherwise unknown stories and songs.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), UC Berkeley linguist Andrew Garrett, digital librarian Erik Mitchell, and anthropologist Ira Jacknis are restoring these recordings.

The Berkeley researchers are using an optical scanning technique developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell.

The collaboration with Haber and Cornell is enabling the NSF-funded research team to transfer all 100 hours of audio content from the wax cylinders to a digital medium.

In this way the researchers can improve the recordings, finally making it possible to figure out which indigenous language is being spoken and what is being said.

The rich Native American cultural collection will ultimately be accessible to indigenous communities as well as the general public and scholars. The linguistic diversity of the world's estimated 7,000 languages is immense.

Modern technologies like this one unlock the documentation to enable new community uses and scientific investigations.

• More info and access to these recordings, visit linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garr...​
• Research co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; grant number PD-230659-15. NSF support provided by award #1500779, "Linguistic and ethnographic sound recordings from early 20th-century California: Optical scanning, digitization, and access."
• Grant URL: nsf.gov/awardsearch/showA... ​ Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent Kate Tobin, Science Nation Producer