This is a long term research project involving both graduate and undergraduate students. Its purpose is to support Native American tribal language restoration projects. Out of more than three hundred languages indigenous to this continent, only about twenty have over a hundred remaining fluent speakers.
The name ACORNS stands for [AC]quisition [O]f [R]estored [N]ative [S]peech. The acorn is sacred to tribes in Northern California and Southern Oregon. This acronym honors these tribes whose support helped spawn this project. ACORNS software is free to download and use for non-commercial purposes; that is, it is not for resale.
You can find out more by moving your mouse to projects by clicking the Acorns Linguistic Project link We welcome your comments and your feedback.
The [E]xtended [L]inquistics [K]eyboards project provides a cross-platform framework for handling indigenous keyboard layouts. It uses the .keylayout stucture because that is the format used on MACs and it is XML based. Prior to ELK, each computer platform had its own way of specifying keyboard mappings. ELK provides the possibility for users to create keyboard mappings with a single uniform approach.
Each linguist uses different technologies to create their dictionaries. The [W]ord [O]riented [L]inguistic [F]ramework provides an easy to use package that has been designed with linguistic needs in view. It will support dictionaries that support multiple languages, provide web-based export of information, and present an easy-to-use interface. We expect the first version of this software will be available summer, 2010.