Native American & Indigenous Studies at Penn
Kashaya Language Resources
Penn Linguistics Professor Eugene Buckley has published a web page with audio and text resources for learning the California Native American Kashaya language (also spelled Kashia), one of seven languages in the Pomoan family, as spoken by the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria. In the introduction to this web page, Buckley notes:
"I first starting learning about Kashaya as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, in a field methods class in 1989-1990. It was directed by Leanne Hinton, and our language consultant was Milton (Bun) Lucas. My dissertation, Theoretical Aspects of Kashaya Phonology and Morphology, was completed in 1992; a slightly revised version was published in 1994. Since then I have written about various topics in Kashaya, which can be seen on my curriculum vitae. I have been working for several years to convert and update Robert Oswalt's unpublished dictionary materials into a lexical database for publication, as well as developing digital resources for language learners."
The link to the web page can be found at Kashaya Language Resources. Resources include the following:
Audio Resources: Apps
Sound files of Kashaya pronounced by Native speakers; most of these are designed as apps to run on Android smartphones or tablets. The first of these, Kashaya cahno, was originally designed for Northern Pomo by Edwin Ko and Cathy O'Connor, and implemented for Kashaya by Edwin Ko.
Audio Resources: Web
For those who do not have access to an Android device, Buckley has also organized the Kashaya image and sound files on a web page that can be easily accessed by a web browser on any computer.
Text Resources
The text resources include pdf documents with information about the Kashaya lexicon. These interim versions of the dictionary database can be viewed on a computer, or printed out.
Buckley notes: "The apps were developed with teams of students in computer science courses at the University of Pennsylvania. They will continue to undergo development, so suggestions for improvement are welcome."
Acknowledgments
Dr. Buckley's research in Kashaya and web page development has been supported by the following:
- A 2011 University Research Foundation grant from the University of Pennsylvania.
- A 2016 Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM) grant funded two students to provide editing assistance.
- A Documenting Endangered Languages grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supported major improvement of the lexical database and recordings included in the Sounds and Words apps.