Tunica is a language isolate from the southeastern United States whose last known native speaker died in 1948. Before that time, three Tunica speakers had worked with three linguists who documented their speech. Since 2010, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe’s Language & Culture Revitalization Program (LCRP) and Tulane University’s Interdisciplinary Program in Linguistics have collaborated on a project to revitalize Tunica based on this documentation. This collaborative Tunica Language Working Group, or Kuhpani Yoyani Luhchi Yoroni (KYLY), is one of community-engaged research, which Baldwin et al. (2022), discussing the Myaamia revitalization effort, define as “a framework that seeks and nurtures community involvement, leverages community knowledge, and is led by community need” (176).
This paper discusses the structure of the revitalization effort and the methods that are used to maximize the effectiveness of a five-person Language & Culture Revitalization Program and a small group of linguistics volunteers. It also covers three main issues that the project has experienced and how it managed them.
First, it discusses language ideology and efforts at ideological clarification, which “covers the conflicts of ‘beliefs, or feelings, about languages’ (Kroskrity 2004) that are the inevitable outcome of the interaction of indigenous, colonial, post-colonial, and professional academic perspectives” (Kroskrity 2009).
Second is how the project ensures it does not fall into a situation where “the [community-engaged] research enterprise is dominated by academics who seek minimal community input” (Baldwin et al. 2022:169).
Lastly it discusses the philosophy underpinning the decision-making on linguistic questions. Because Tunica has no native speakers and is a language isolate, the revitalization effort requires more decisions be taken where no clear answer is apparent, and “[t]here is always the question of what will be easy, accessible, and transparent versus what is authentic, justified, and true to the source material” (Whitaker 2017:97).
Every language revitalization program has different needs and processes, but many of the same issues. The problems the Tunica language project has encountered and dealt with will hopefully be of use to other revitalization programs.