BOULDER, Colo. — The University of Colorado Boulder is leading an effort to preserve the Arapaho language, for which there are fewer than 100 living native speakers today.

“There are not a lot of speakers left, and all the speakers are now getting into their 70s and even 80s,” said CU Boulder linguistics professor Andrew Cowell.

The Arapaho are a Native American tribe whose historic lands include Colorado and Wyoming.

Cowell has been leading the charge on the project to document the language in audio and video and store it in a database. His work is being shared in two databases — one containing a collection of over 100,000 sentences from native speakers sharing their stories and culture, and a lexical database, which is a structured collection of information about words, including thei

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