Uma’ Anũpa’ (Uma’) is a long-term passion project of a group of Houma volunteers and linguists. The Houma Language Project was founded in 2013 with the goal of revitalizing the Houma language, the Native Language of the Houma people not prevalent since the 18th century.

 

We began by collecting materials, such as Swanton’s 80+ words and phrases and a recording of Elvira Billiot and Valentine Dardar singing Houma songs. We soon found there were not enough records available to recreate the language as it was originally spoken. Based on this fact, the HLP team decided to reclaim the language instead.

 

Existing words and phrases were compared to other Muskogean languages to map linguistic similarities and differences. From this study, we built a grammatical structure and vocabulary to form Uma’, an extrapolation of what the original Houma language could have evolved into over the past centuries.