**University of Colorado Boulder Leads Effort to Preserve the Arapaho Language**

BOULDER, Colo. — The University of Colorado Boulder is spearheading an important initiative to preserve the Arapaho language, which today has fewer than 100 native speakers remaining.

“There are not a lot of speakers left, and all the speakers are now getting into their 70s and even 80s,” said CU Boulder linguistics professor Andrew Cowell.

The Arapaho are a Native American tribe whose historic lands include parts of Colorado and Wyoming. To safeguard their language, Cowell has been leading a project to document the Arapaho language through audio and video recordings, which are then stored in a comprehensive database.

This work is shared across two key databases: one contains a collection of over 100,000 sentences recorded from native speakers sharing their stories and culture; the other is a lexical database — a structured compilation of words including their meanings, relationships, and linguistic properties.

“What we’re able to do is use computational approaches to the database, where we can actually determine what the most common words are and what the least common words are,” Cowell explained. “From that, we’ve produced a student dictionary.”

The project is a passion for Cowell, who has been researching the Arapaho language for 25 years. He says the relationships he has built within the community are the most rewarding part of his work.

“It does take a while to get to know people, to convince them that you’re not there just to exploit them or just grab some data and run,” Cowell said. “I eventually was adopted into the tribe by a family and given an Arapaho name.”

Throughout the project, Cowell and his team collaborated with 100 different native speakers to build the database. Today, this resource is being used to teach a new generation the language of their parents and grandparents.

“There are several younger people who are starting to speak the language,” Cowell shared. “I’ve been working with them for almost 20 years, down in Oklahoma and Wyoming, helping them learn the language better — and they’re using the database.”

The database is currently available to CU students and faculty. In the future, 5,000 sentences with detailed linguistic labeling will be made accessible to the public.

Cowell also highlighted concerns about data sovereignty, especially in the age of AI and tools like ChatGPT.

“Many Native American tribes are concerned about what they call data sovereignty,” he said. “They worry that their language, culture, and sensitive information might just be scraped and taken onto the web, without their control.”

This initiative reflects a vital effort to preserve the rich linguistic heritage of the Arapaho people while respecting their rights and autonomy over their cultural data.
https://www.denver7.com/lifestyle/education/cu-boulder-project-is-preserving-and-teaching-the-arapaho-language