How An Octogenarian Preserved An Endangered Native American Language
Jordan Kushins
Yesterday 8:30pm
It's easy to take translations for granted when Google can swap between Albanian and Zulu with the click of a button, but even that tech has real world limitations. Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of 130 different endangered Native American languages in the United States that don't have any kind of digital—or analog—legacy.
Over the course of seven years in California's San Joaquin Valley, she worked with her daughter and grandson to catalog everything she knows about the language. First, she hand-scrawled memories on scraps of paper; then, she hunt-and-pecked on an old keyboard to complete a dictionary and type out legends like "How We Got Our Hands." Next, she recorded the whole thing on audio for pronunciation—it's very specific!—and posterity.
http://gizmodo.com/how-an-81-year-old-woman-preserved-an-endangered-native-1639334577
