Hymes wrote the introduction for The Origin and Diversification of Language by Morris Swadesh, edited by Joel Sherzer.

This collection is music for 97 songs, written by Helen Roberts and Morris Swadesh. Also includes an analytic chart.

This collection primarily contains Chitimacha material, with some additional Nootka material, originally recorded on 23 wax cylinders by Morris Swadesh in 1933 and 1934. The recordings were transferred circa 1951 to 2 sound tape reels. Due to the poor condition of the original cylinders, the sound quality of the recordings is generally poor. Tape 1 contains elicited sentences, folklore, and autobiographical stories told in Chitimacha by Benjamin Paul, chief from 1903 to 1934, and Delphine Ducloux, the last known speaker of Chitimacha. Recorded in Louisiana in 1933 on 22 wax cylinders. Tape 2 contains elicited sentences, unidentified narrative, and some singing in Nootka by Alex Thomas. Recorded at Port Alberni, British Columbia, on 1 wax cylinder in 1934.

Nuu-chah-nulth songs and stories, and Makah stories, recorded by Morris Swadesh on 5 wire spools in Port Alberni and Neah Bay in 1949. Includes Nuu-chah-nulth (primarily Tseshaht) songs, group singing, historical stories, and Makah stories.

The material in the collection is an assembly of unrelated recording collections made by multiple collectors. This collection consists of recordings on wire or phonograph discs sent by the APS Library to the Library of Congress in December 1970 in exchange for duplication of the material on to archival reel-to-reel tapes. The original formats are housed at the Library of Congress.

An archaeological anthropologist and linguist, John Alden Mason spent the majority of his career at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Penn in 1907, Mason received a doctorate at Berkeley (1911) for his ethnographic work on the Salinan Indians of California, but his diverse interests in later years ran the gamut from Puerto Rican folklore to Piman languages and cultures (including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano), Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology, and the languages of South American Indians. Mason was curator of the University Museum at Penn from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. The Mason Papers include both in-coming and outgoing correspondence, linguistic material, notes, and photographs relating to Mason's work in the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, and South America. Centered on the years after Mason's return to Philadelphia in 1926, the collection covers all aspects of Mason's professional life, from reports on field work to answering casual questions referred to him through the University Museum to data and analyses on Piman and other languages. The collection also contains voluminous files relating to the Mason's editorship of the American Anthropologist (bulk: 1945-1948). Of special note are a series of class notes (1908-1910) kept by Mason for course work in ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Edward Sapir and Frank Speck.

Audio recordings, primarily linguistic field recordings of Native American languges, removed from the James M. Crawford papers. The bulk of the recordings are in three areas: Alabama songs, stories, and fiddle music; Cocopa folklore, autobiographical stories, songs, and elicited words and sentences; Yuchi autobiographical stories, conversations, and elicitied word lists. Other material includes: Cherokee conversations; Chickasaw word and phrases lists; readings from a Chontal-Spanish dictionary; a Diegueño text; words lists and discussion regarding the Mobilian trade language (Yama); intermixed Mobilian, Choctaw, and Koasati word lists; Mohave songs, with explanations; a Navajo elicitation session, with interview and conversation; elicited Shoshoni expressions; Tolowa songs, Yavapai word lists and texts; and Yuki words and expressions. The small amount of non-Native American material in the collection generally consists of unidentified conversations, readings of English and Russian texts, and recordings of baby talk.

Dell Hymes' doctoral research on Kathlamet Chinook (Indiana University, 1955) grew into a lifelong interest in the relationship between ethnography and linguistics. Following academic appointments at Harvard University (1955-1960) and the University of California, Berkley (1960-1965), Hymes joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. During twenty-two years tenure at Penn he was a professor of folklore, linguistics, sociology and education. In 1975, he was promoted to Dean of the Graduate School of Education (1975-1987). A principal proponent of the emergent field of sociolinguistics, his most influential works include Reinventing Anthropology and Language in Culture and Society. The Hymes papers cover all aspects of Dell Hymes' professional life. Subcollection I is concentrated on his years at the University of Pennsylvania, his presidencies of the American Association of Anthropology and the Linguistic Society of America, and his editorship of the journal Language in Society. Subcollection II is broader, focusing much more on published and unpublished linguistic work on dozens of languages, mostly of North America. Of particular interest is his rich correspondence with colleagues and students on linguistic issues. The papers reflect Hymes' interests in the history of linguistics and anthropology, Native American languages (especially oral literatures), and his comparative ethnographies of communication.

The papers contain correspondence, research and teaching notes, data (card and slip) files, published and unpublished manuscripts by Lounsbury and others, books and reprints, sound recordings, and computer programs and files. Correspondents include: William N. Fenton, Mary R. Haas, William C. Sturtevant, Morris Swadesh, and Carl F. Voegelin. Roughly one-quarter of the collection relates to Iroquoian languages and includes much WPA Oneida Project material. Research into the Cherokee language, South American languages, and kinship structures is also well represented. Floyd Lounsbury's wife, Masako Yokoyama Lounsbury, is represented by a smaller amount of material relating to linguistic research in Shanghai and research on Quechua.