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Living Tongues Institute for Endangered
Languages began the Siletz Dee-Ni Online
Talking Dictionary Project in early
2006. The dictionary had restricted
access to tribal members and affiliated
scholars only. In January 2011, at the
request of the tribal council, the
Talking Dictionary dropped its
password-protected entry, making all of
its content publicly accessible. All of
the 12,000 words in the Siletz Dee-ni
Talking Dictionary have now been
recorded. Since September 2010, the
number of entries in the dictionary has
more than doubled, and now stands at
over 10,000 entries. The rest of the
recordings will be uploaded by the
year’s end.
In summer 2011, work began to expand
Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary to
include modern and legacy photographic
assets and video recordings. This will
make the Talking Dictionary a more
comprehensive and encyclopedic resource.
In addition, a number of legacy audio
recordings of Siletz Dee-ni speakers
will supplement the existing recordings
in the future. Bud Lane has served as
the main speaker for entries that were
born digital to date, but these are to
be supplemented by legacy materials. In
addition to Dr. Anderson who recorded
all the words for the talking
dictionary, many students of Dr.
Harrison's at Swarthmore have
contributed in a major way to the
development of the dictionary in its
current form. These include especially
Kit La Touche, Rio Akasaka, Amy Smolek,
and Jen Johnson. The Siletz Dee-Ni
Online Talking Dictionary is hosted on a
Linux server at Swarthmore College with
full backup and RAID array redundancy.
It is programmed in the MySQL database
management system, which supports
multi-user access.
In 1855, after years of harsh treatment, the twenty seven
Tribes of the Confederation of Siletz Indians were forced
onto the original Siletz Reservation. With so many languages
in one area, a lingua franca, Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa)
was a natural and necessary resolution. This meant many of
the languages of the original reservation settlers have
passed out of existence without being properly recorded. In
fact, it appears that only one speaker of one language from
this time remains at Siletz itself.
Siletz Dee-Ni is an Oregon Athabaskan language of the
Chetco-Tolowa type with words from
Chasta Costa, Applegate, Galice, Rogue River, and other
members of the Siletz Confederation.
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Siletz Dee-Ni Talking Online
Dictionary Project
Siletz Sound Sample
