Blackfoot Words (v1.0) is launched!

The Blackfoot Lab at Yale has been hard at work developing Blackfoot Words, a new relational database of lexical forms (words, stems, and morphemes) in Blackfoot (Algonquian; ISO 639-3: bla). To date, we have digitized 62,693 individual lexical forms from 26 sources, representing all four major dialects, and spanning the years 1743–2017. We are very pleased to announce the launch of Version 1 of the database, which includes lexical forms from nine of these sources.

The project in general has two aims. The first is to digitize and provide access to the lexical data in these sources, many of which are difficult to access and discover. The second is to organize the data so that connections can be made between instances of the “same” lexical form across all sources, despite variation across sources in the dialect recorded, orthographic conventions, and the depth of morpheme analysis. The result is a database that we hope can be used for language maintenance programs as well as academic projects. 

A very big shout out to all members of the Blackfoot Lab since 2020, who have put in hundreds of person hours on this project: Isobel Anthony YC ‘20, (2020), Charelle Brown YC ‘20 (2020), Tyler Brown, Josh Celli YC ‘21 (2020-2021), McKenzie Denham, Hailey Dykstra, Rodrigo Hernandez-Merlin, Evan Hochstein, Pinyu Hwang, Paige Johnson YC ‘20 (2020), Nico Kidd, Diana Kulmizev, Shayley Martin, Hannah Morrison, Matty Norris, Hema Patel, Evan Roberts, Lena Venkatraman. Also thanks to Alex Smith, a Research Assistant at the University of Lethbridge, who joined us during Summer 2021.