LANDER — Back in January 2022, 21 Shoshone language speakers came together in Fort Washakie to formally combine their uncommon vocabularies.
During this two-week Rapid Word Collection intensive, more than 6,000 unique words were recorded into a first-of-its-kind audio archive.
Now this archive is available to the public in the form of an online dictionary – a critical step toward preserving the Shoshone language and an essential resource for new and emerging speakers.
“Shoshone has a lot of sounds that do not exist in English,” noted Robyn Rofkar, Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center administrative assistant. “At the Cultural Center, we’ve had written dictionaries for a long time, but people always asked: ‘How do we pronounce these words?’”
Using the new online dictionary and companion app, Shoshone language learners can practice and compare their pronunciation against recordings of elders and native speakers.
“There are many different dialects of Shoshone,” explained Rofkar. “Part of the challenge was accounting for the variety of existing pronunciations, spellings, and alphabets.”
Linguists and advisors from The Language Conservatory assisted with the project, facilitating conversations aimed at uncovering undocumented words and agreed-upon definitions.
Before the Cultural Center could effectively document words, they had to settle on a working orthography – a system for spelling words according to established usage.
With the help of an existing framework developed by linguists Wick Miller and Beverly Crum, the project landed on a 17-letter alphabet that contains the building blocks for every word in the new dictionary.

During the initial Rapid Word Collection gathering, participants were broken up into small groups, each focusing on a particular domain of words. While one group cataloged words related to the human body, another worked on terms for plants and animals.
“Each group had their own scribe,” recalled Rofkar. “Once a word’s pronunciation and meaning was agreed upon, the scribe would help the speakers record it and upload it to the database.”
Though a new generation of speakers on the Wind River Reservation are currently learning Shoshone in the classroom, the majority of fluent speakers are elderly.
Five of the 21 participants from the 2022 Rapid Word Collection intensive have since passed away.
“It depends on what you mean by ‘fluent,’ but there aren’t many speakers out there,” Rofkar said. “We invited all of the speakers that we knew in the area, and we came up with a list of 50.”
There are roughly 4,500 enrolled Eastern Shoshone tribal members. Around 2,500 live on and around the Wind River Reservation. Of this local group, roughly half are 18 years old or younger, and according to Rofkar, none of them are fluent.
“There is one younger guy who recently turned 18 who has been picking up the language quickly through visits with his grandmother,” Rofkar said. “We know it’s possible to teach the next generation.”
Though Rofkar is not fluent herself, she has studied Shoshone for many years and continues working toward conversational mastery.
“It’s a very enjoyable language to know and listen to,” she explained. “Speakers seem to laugh more when they use Shoshone. Jokes are built into the language.”
Over the course of the Rapid Word Collection intensive, speakers had a chance to converse with each other on a daily basis – likely for the first time in decades. Rofkar noticed that many of the speakers grew more confident and conversational as the days passed, recalling long-forgotten words around the lunch table or during a ride home.
Going forward, the Cultural Center plans to continue hosting speakers for in-person conversations in hopes of bolstering the online dictionary.
“We’re really pleased that we collected so many recordings of Shoshone words for the first time,” said Rofkar. “It’s very important to be able to hear the language in order to learn because pronunciations require a lot of practice.”
For example, the Shoshone word for water, “paa,” is pronounced with a subtle p sound that is perhaps closer to the English pronunciation of b.
“A linguist that we worked with explained, ‘to pronounce the Shoshone p, there should be no puff of air coming from the mouth,” said Rofkar. “If you hold a tissue in front of your face, it shouldn’t move when you say ‘paa.’” To say watermelon in Shoshone, paa, (water), is combined with the word for food, dekapeh. Water food, watermelon, paadekapeh – pronounced “paa deck cup.”
This kind of logical on-paper word construction is common in the language.
The tricky part, especially coming from a background in English, is clear pronunciation. Due to its whimsical pronunciation, one of Rofkar’s favorite Shoshone words is tukunekwintoiq – “doo koo nuh quin doynt” – which translates to hot dog, or “meat rolled up.”
“The audio recordings were the missing piece. Now, learning speakers will be able to listen and practice at home,” said Rofkar. “It took a lot of hard dedicated work from our Shoshone speakers to reach this point. As one of them put it, ‘This language has been with us for thousands of years and it’s not going to die with me.’”