Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has found several good sites for learning Oneida (Ethnologue, Wikipedia): the Oneida Language Revitalisation Program, Oneida Language Tools (including a grammar section that links to pdf files of “a 165 page document that describes the basic sound, word, and sentence structures of Oneida”), and Tracy Williams’ site (warning: automatically launches video clip). As Lameen says, “It’s great to see this much material online for a language with less than two hundred speakers; this should make it a lot easier for would-be speakers to make a good start at learning it.”
Reminds me of how Mike Peters of the Welsh band the Alarm learned Welsh and recorded a couple albums in that language when he feared it was dying. Difference between that and Oneida for me is, he had a vested interest in it being Welsh.
I’ll look into the Oneida stuff it sounds interesting. I loike your blog, just started subscribing. Keep up the good work.
Hmpf. Not exactly my beer, but it conforms to my prejudice that you should never let a user of the Americanist Phonetic Notation develop an orthography.
There is much there that would be of interest to an anthropological linguist. No doubt about it.
It’s gratifying to see the attempt. I have a friend involved with a group trying to provide material for Lakota and the politics are deeply depressing. Here, we have all these wonderful new tools — and no way to really take advantage of them. In the meantime, native speakers are dying off. Tribal elders don’t want to cooperate with outsiders unless they have almost total control (a very understandable point), but they have no linguistic knowledge on how to collect and provide an effective grammar, so the venture is doomed from the start. What a damn stupid waste.