Daryl Baldwin facts for kids

Daryl Baldwin is an American academic and linguist who specializes in the Myaamia language. An enrolled member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, Baldwin has served as a member of the cultural resource advisory committee of the Miami Tribe.

Education

Baldwin received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Arts in Native American linguistics from the University of Montana.

Career

Baldwin is the director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The center works to revitalize endangered languages. His devotion to the work of language revitalization led to the creation of the Myaamia Center at Miami University and his appointment as the director and was chosen in 2016 as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Baldwin seeks to revitalize languages for the people of the community, language and cultural revitalization.

After reading a draft of David Costa's thesis on the Miami-Illinois language, Baldwin realized he would need training in linguistics to not only understand Costa's work but also work to revitalize his own language and to teach it to others. The realization led Baldwin to apply for a graduate degree at the University of Montana. Since 1996, Baldwin began to teach himself and his family and four children the Miami language. Baldwin also learned through studies held by the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives.

Linguistic work

Baldwin works with Myaamia people developing culture and language-based educational materials and programs for the community. Baldwin has taught and raised his four children as native speakers of Myaamia and continues to teach others as assistant educational leadership professor.

Much of Baldwin's work has been collaborative, contributing to edited collections and journal articles, and he also works with other linguists such as Leanne Hinton's National Breath of Life project, a two-week biennial gathering of linguists sharing, finding and utilizing linguistic archival sources.