Earlier this year, this site carried the first announcement of a Brothertown language initiative just getting started: a plan to bring the language of the Brothertown Indian Nation back into everyday reach through a dictionary, lessons, and software. That post promised a public resource in the making. Today that resource has a front door — and it takes over one of this site's jobs.

The Brothertown Language website is live at brothertown-language.com — the public home for the project and a resource for the revival of the language of the Brothertown Indian Nation. Start there, follow its blog, and subscribe to its atom feed, because that is where project news goes now. Announcements like this one will no longer appear on this site; brothertown-language.com is the project's news source from today forward, and this site returns to its usual work.

What's there today🔗

The site is in its base setup — the About page says so directly. What it holds right now:

  • An About page introducing the project and where it is headed.
  • A blog, which from today carries the project's news.
  • An atom feed, so the blog can follow you home in a feed reader.

Fuller biography, method, and reference material arrive in later releases, and their announcements will land on the project's blog. For background on how this project started, see the January post, Brothertown Community Language Initiative.

Why now🔗

The short answer: the moment finally exists. More materials are available now to make a true Brothertown language reconstruction possible — and when the pieces line up like that, the right move is to put the project's first public-facing services in place, starting with this site.

Beneath the software, the purpose is to recover our lost heritage: to build a language that represents all of the founding tribes with honor and respect, favoring none over another, with the linguist's analysis determining the final reconstructed forms. The shared linguistic roots of all the founding tribes need a place in it.

The work underneath follows a steady rhythm: every two weeks, the project's linguist meets with the site developer and programmer to review the output of modern computational linguistic methods for correctness, among other items. As much of the work as possible is prepared in advance, so each session starts from a finished draft rather than a blank page.

The code behind the project🔗

The project develops in the open under the Brothertown-Language organization on GitHub. Its public repositories now include:

  • brothertown-language-com — the project website's own repository, covering methodology, dictionary, and lessons.
  • snea-grammar — starting a grammar knowledge base for Southern New England Algonquian; over time it will carry per-language realization layers in descriptive, teaching, and prescriptive forms.
  • snea-lib — laying down shared Python machinery for the SNEA projects: the derivation, composition, and orthography/IPA tools the other pieces will build on.
  • snea-shoebox-editor — a Python web application for concurrent editing of linguistic records from across Southern New England Algonquian languages, already at work in the browser.

The grammar and library repositories are early — the foundations are public, and the building continues. Watching them take shape is part of the point of developing in the open.

What you can do🔗

The site is live, the code is public, and the project has a front door. From here, the news moves to the project's own pages. Thank you for your time and continued interest in our shared cultural future — see you at brothertown-language.com.

With respect and gratitude,

Michael Conrad
Developer, Brothertown Language project

#Brothertown #LanguageRevitalization #LanguageReconstruction #Algonquian #Indigenous #Linguistics #SNEA #OpenSource

🤖 Co-authored with AI: OpenCode (ollama-cloud/glm-5.3-flash)

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