UC Berkeley’s language archive breathes new life into endangered Indigenous languages

BERKELEY, CA., 8/16/2026 — The California Language Archive is the largest, most comprehensive physical and digital collection of records of Indigenous language materials in North America.

Housed in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, the archive has preserved California’s dying Indigenous languages since 1949. It has built its records through dialect surveys and donations for many decades and has begun sponsoring similar preservation efforts in Latin America.