The (Northern) Arapaho language is spoken by about 1000 people, in a sharply age-stratified distribution. Language shift was rapid beginning in the late 19^th century, when the Wind River Reservation was established, and children began to attend boarding schools (where administrators used punitive tactics to enforce English monolingualism, as was common in that era). Currently most or all fluent speakers are in their 50s or older. It has been over 40 years since children have learned Arapaho in the home.

The Arapaho language is at an extremely critical stage, in which endangerment is a crisis, but revitalization is surely possible. A significant segment of the population of fluent speakers is elderly enough that they no longer are able to participate as caregivers and teachers, yet there is still a population of (relatively) younger speakers in their 50s, 60s and 70s who are potentially active participants in language revitalization. There is certainly hope that community and individual efforts will result in successful language learning, and the creation of small enclaves of Northern Arapaho language use in the community. Shift to English is a long-standing and powerful force at Wind River, but it is still possible to hear fluent conversations among elders. The Wind River Reservation has made significant efforts in bilingual education over the last decade, with mixed results. The most promising educational program is an immersion kindergarten and pre-school that has been running since 1993. Despite these efforts, no fluent speakers have been created through these programs. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that most of the teachers are not themselves fluent in the language.

This proposal is for support of fieldwork for a period of three weeks in July 2003. The two main goals of the trip this summer are to begin the recording of an audio dictionary, and document the system of Arapaho pitch accent. The collaborating researcher (CR) has learned during her previous fieldwork experience at the Wind River Reservation that there is little interest among the community in an updated print dictionary, but that there is significant interest in an audio dictionary. An audio dictionary would aid in learning Arapaho pronunciation, particularly in understanding the complicated and under-described pitch accent system. Investigating Arapaho pitch accent will also benefit academic linguistics, since the topic has not received a thorough or definitive treatment in the academic literature.

The phonology of pitch accent is a topic much in need of study, both from the perspective of the Arapaho language teaching efforts, and of academic linguistics. Confusion over Arapaho pitch accent has proven to be a stumbling block in the community efforts to teach the language. Native speakers find the complicated sandhi alternations intuitive, and see no reason to mark them in the orthography, while for learners these alternations can be daunting. We hope our efforts will contribute to the community language revitalization efforts by creating materials that demonstrate the pitch accent system without necessarily describing it in technical linguistic rules. The recordings and accompanying printed material that we produce will be designed to be helpful to both adult and child learners of Arapaho. We hope to create materials that teachers can incorporate into their lessons, or use in preparation for lessons.

In addition to this pedagogically important material, the documentary and descriptive aspect of our research will be an important contribution to academic Arapaho studies. Pitch accent has been described in several different ways in the published sources on Arapaho, ranging from little-to-no documentation (in the work of A.L. Kroeber) to a non-phonemic treatment (in the work of Z. Salzmann). A definitive description of the pitch accent system, including number of contrasting pitch types and details of sandhi rules, will clear up confusion in this area.

A current phonological description will be particularly helpful for elucidating the development of Arapaho pitch accent from Proto-Algonquian and Proto-Algic. (Such historical topics are the focus of the primary researcher.) I. Goddard has identified some historical correlations for Arapaho and Atsina accent, for example that Arapaho disyllabic words with accent on the first syllable are proto-Arapaho-Atsina (P-A-A) disyllables, while Arapaho disyllabic words with accent on the second syllable are often P-A-A trisyllables, or have undergone vowel lengthening or concatenation. Most of the details of the development of Arapaho pitch accent, however, remain to be worked out.

Our basic method will be to record words both in isolation and in the context of an example sentence. This will demonstrate pre-pausal and non-pre-pausal allophones of pitch accent. We will begin with a list of 200 lexemes that are deemed common vocabulary items, representative of different parts of speech. We will include, for example, colors and body parts that are common in the Arapaho-language school curriculum.

In addition to working in a formal way with consultants on a daily basis, we will be involving ourselves in more informal ways, such as spending time at the senior center (where one can still hear fluent conversation in Arapaho), attending community language classes, and talking to bilingual educators about their classes. We will continue to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with people at Wind River, since the current proposed project is part of a longer-term fieldwork endeavor that we are establishing. Our long-term goals are comprehensive grammatical description, comparative and historical work (especially with the Ritwan languages Yurok and Wiyot), description of the sociolinguistic situation on the Wind River Reservation, and contributions to Arapaho language revitalization. We will seek additional funding in order to continue our fieldwork over a period of two to five years, and hope to spend several spring-summer seasons at Wind River.