The LA Times has a story on a new dictionary that is helping to save Samala (the Chumash language) from extinction: “Chumash language brought back from the brink”:

A generation ago, the ancient Chumash tongue of Samala was all but dead, its songs and sagas buried in a university basement beneath mountains of yellowing research notes.

But now Samala is the talk of the reservation.

Thanks largely to a non-American Indian graduate student who was working for pocket money 40 years ago, the tribe has unveiled the first major Samala dictionary, a key moment in the language’s rebirth.

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