News and Announcements

Announcing the opening of the Terrence Kaufman Collections at AILLA

With great pleasure, we announce the opening of the Terrence Kaufman Collections at AILLA. In 2012 the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) was awarded the NSF grant BCS-1157867 "Archiving the Terrence Kaufman Collection," and the archive staff began the work of organizing, digitizing, ingesting and curating the vast assemblage of American indigenous language materials in the possession of Terrence Kaufman.

Archived language identified!

Since 2004, a recording of an unidentified language has been living in AILLA in the Argentinian Languages Collection of Herminia Martín under the resource folder name "Conversation in unspecified language". When Herminia Martín's open reel tapes where digitized and added to AILLA in 2004, this tape was not labeled. AILLA staff knew that it had to be one of four languages (Chorote, Nivaclé, Pilagá or Wichí Lhamtés Vejoz), but they were not able determine exactly which one it was.

New collection of Iskonawa language materials

New in AILLA this month is the Iskonawa Language Collection of José Antonio Mazzotti, Roberto Zariquiey, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino and Carolina Rodríguez Alzzaa. This collection focuses on Iskonawa, a Panoan language spoken by only a very few individuals, several of whom appear in this collection. The collection has about 4.5 hours of audio and video, much of it transcribed and translated into Spanish, as well as documents containing a 240 page grammar sketch and a 1700-entry vocabulary of Iskonawa.