[…] During week-long programs in June and July, Myaamia kids and teens learn about “Ašiihkiwi neehi Kiišikwi,” or Earth and Sky. They attend scavenger hunts to find natural objects like rocks or plants using lists written in Myaamia; they sing songs in their language and learn dances, games and other activities. Young learners of Myaamia are also embedding their language by using it in a very modern context: social media.

“We’re starting to see the Myaamia language on Facebook and Twitter, and if young people are engaged and have the social media tools to use the language, they will use that,” says Daryl Baldwin, a Miami Tribe member and director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “Young people want to chit-chat in their language, tease each other, and joke a little.”

That these youth are able to communicate with any degree of fluency in the language of their forefathers is due, in large part, to advancements in digitization. Scanning and digitizing the surviving written records of dormant Native American languages housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the Library of Congress and in the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives makes them much more accessible to language researchers and experts with a keen interest in reconstructing Native American languages. More.

See: Smithsonian Science News

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