Wikipedia Trail: From Cherokee to Caddo Language

This week, I did my reading over Cherokee Fairy Tales and I decided I wanted to learn more about where the people began.  So, for a Wikipedia Trail post, I went to the Cherokee Wikipedia article and read about the origins of the Cherokee people.  I learned fascinating things about where the Cherokee started and learned that they began in the Southeastern Woodlands, around Georgia.  I noticed that "indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands" was a link and decided to follow it to learn about what other people are from this region. 

In this article, I learned about how the different inhabitants of North America are broken up into different regions.  The Southeastern Woodlands encompasses tribes with languages in the Caddoan and Muskogean language families.  Being the linguist nerd that I am, I decided to follow one of these trails to learn more about one of these language families and I found myself on the Caddoan Languages article next. 

I actually found myself on this page last week when I visited the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center over Spring Break and discovered that the mound builders are part of the Caddoan Language family.  This time that I read the article, I decided to learn more about the Caddo language itself, so I followed that link and found myself at the Caddo language article.

Image taken by my boyfriend, Justin Mai on March 21st, 2018

Here, I learned fascinating things about this language.  It is spoken by very few people now and there are some efforts to revitalize the language.  The Caddo Nation offers weekly classes on the language and there is even an app for android devices that teaches you Caddo.  My morphology class this semester works with endangered languages often and I think I'm going to get my professor to let us work with Caddo, because reading the article, I can tell it is a beautiful language that needs a little more attention so it doesn't disappear.