CU Boulder professor leads effort to help save the Arapaho language

There are only about 50 people worldwide who are native speakers of the Arapaho language.

The only native speakers left are part of the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming, according to University of Colorado Boulder linguist and professor Andrew Cowell. The Southern Arapaho Tribe in Oklahoma has no native speakers, people who grew up learning Arapaho as their first language.

“Can we save a language that’s down to around 50 (native) speakers in the world?” Cowell said. “That’s a pretty scary bottleneck to confront.”

Despite the challenge, Cowell is doing just that. He has created two digital databases to preserve the Arapaho language so it can be taught to younger generations. One database is a collection of words, similar to a dictionary, and the second database is similar to an antholog