Does anyone know of any (preferably free) online corpora of indigenous American languages (anywhere on the American hemisphere)? I've managed to find corpora of many of the common world languages, but I'm interested in adding some of the more diverse languages to my library as well. However, just about all of the indigenous American languages have been so marginalized that I can't find any widely-spoken enough to have corpora available.
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A colleague who works with indigenous American languages tells me: "People in this business are very protective of the materials. Many local communities have really tight restrictions. And the corpora are, in general, miniscule, even for the insider who has full access. The best places to find things like this are to go to archives' websites, like this one. Warning: it will likely be frustrating and disappointing."– jlawlerApr 3, 2013 at 19:32
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@jlawler Mind to provide that as an answer?– AlenannoApr 4, 2013 at 11:32
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2 Answers
If you are interested, then here's a website with a list of resources for Quechua, the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas. I highly recommend that you visit the following website:
http://www.cl.uzh.ch/research/nlp4quechua_en.html
There is a project that is dedicated to collecting corpora for indigenous languages in South America. They are focusing especially on Quechua, Aymara and Guarani. The project is called hltdi-l3 and is collecting parallel corpora for these languages and English.
I am from Peru and I work in the computer linguistics area. In my experience I have found that the institution in my country that has the most corpora is the "PUCP". They have a project called lengamer which is focused on lots of indigenous languages (the website is in spanish):
In my case I work with Quechua and Ashaninka. If I could be of any help just write to me.
Hope this is helpful.
Sorry for the spelling and grammar mistakes in advance.
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@JustinOlbrantz please accept this as an answer or upvote, if you found it helpful :) Apr 6, 2013 at 20:39
While not actual native text (and thus potentially lacking some of the subtleties of the grammar), I just ran across a site of possible interest: http://www.scriptureearth.org/ which contains Bible translations for a substantial number of obscure/marginalized languages, with PDF versions available.