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 over three periods (1886, 1907–1910, 1933–1939). 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, “a framework that seeks and nurtures community involvement, leverages community knowledge, and is led by community need” (Baldwin et al. 2022:176).
From its inception, KYLY has included tribal language workers who decide on the direction and priorities of the language project. Involving the wider community is more challenging. The community must have multiple ways to engage with the language. One of the methods of engagement for which the community has expressed great interest is looking at and interacting with existing language documentation materials.
This presentation explores how KYLY has responded to this community desire, and the successes and challenges of presenting the language documentation transcribed, parsed, and analyzed in SIL’s Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) publicly. It examines how software designed for linguistic analysis often lacks built-in tools for easily publishing language documentation in an accessible manner, and the third-party software solutions and bespoke methods that KYLY has developed and is developing in its effort to take the Tunica language documentation in the FLEx database and make it accessible to the community.