Digital Domains for Native American Languages

This paper reviews the emerging role of digital technologies that support Native North American languages as a communicative medium in the 21st century.

This article was drafted in 2015 for the Handbook of North American Indians and may be somewhat dated due to the time elapsed during the publication process. Since the Handbook was conceived in the 1960s, digital forms of communication have become ubiquitous for non-Indigenous languages in North America, often serving as the primary domain of communication. The role of computers and the Internet as tools for accessing Native American language materials is discussed briefly in Volume 2 (Hinton 2008:351) using the data available by 2005–2006. However, the digital domain remains underdeveloped for Native American languages, though the examples discussed here provide evidence that this is beginning to change. While digital technologies including email, text messaging, websites, and social media have become integral to communication in English, Spanish, French, and other languages of wider communication, few of these technologies are fully supported in Native North American languages.