Sharing the Iñupiaq Language

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Sharing the Iñupiaq Language

The Alaska Office of the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center hosted an Iñupiaq language workshop in January 2011, bringing together eight fluent speakers of Alaska's northernmost Native tongue for four days of intensive discussions about NMNH and NMAI objects in the Smithsonian exhibition, Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska at the Anchorage Museum. One goal of the project is to document a language that is now spoken fluently by fewer than 600 people, 92% of them over the age of 65. Another is to create language teaching videos for use in the North Alaskan schools. This project represents one of the Arctic Studies Center's major initiatives under the NMNH Recovering Voices program. For more information, go to http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/alaska.htm

3 min 32 sec

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