Alabama Project

Alabama is an endangered language of the Muskogean family that is currently only spoken on the Alabama-Coushatta reservation in Texas. I got introduced to this indigenous community by Ava Silva, an undergraduate student at Harvard and a member of the tribe. In 2024, my lab started a collaborative project with the Alabama-Coushatta tribe, whose main goals are documentation and preservation of the Alabama language. I have been directing regular fieldtrips to the Alabama-Coushatta reservation (June 2024, 2025, 2026 and January 2025, 2026), in which my students and I investigate grammatical properties of Alabama and conduct language workshops for the community. We are working on writing a grammatical description of Alabama and on creating teaching materials for the language. We are working with Stevie Zya Harvel to create a coloring book that teaches letters of the Alabama alphabet and some related words and phrases. Some of the materials that we’ve been creating, as well as an updated version of the Alabama Dictionary (Sylestine, Hardy & Montler 1993), can be found here: https://alabamadictionary.github.io/ (website designed by Jacob Fernandes).