The Jane M. Rosenthal papers contain a wide variety of historical and contemporary audio recordings, texts, elicitations and grammatical descriptions of Nahuatl, particularly the variety spoken in Tlaxcala, Mexico, both from the research of Rosenthal and others. Fieldwork in Tlaxcala (including photographs), archival research in Mexico and Chicago, and the work of many scholars that formed the Friends of Uto-Aztecan are represented.

The William O. Bright papers consist particularly of extensive correspondence relating mostly to his later academic work, a number of field notebooks from North America and India, publications on and by Indigenous North Americans (especially Karuk and other Californian tribes) and from linguistic societies, his own research and publications, and extensive lexical slip files (especially on Karuk, Spanish borrowings, and copies of Daythal Kendall's Takelma and Kalapuyan files). Many audio recordings are also present, some of which are duplicates of those at the California Language Archive. In addition to the materials browsable through the finding aid, Bright's email correspondence and computer files can be accessed onsite at the APS. William Bright's career extended to a wide variety of linguistic work, including Native Californian languages and literatures, Native American place names, editorships of major linguistics journals, and writing systems of the world.

For many years referred to as the "Franz Boas Collection of American Indian Linguistics," this collection consists of a large body of linguistic and ethnographic material gathered together by Boas and many of his colleagues and students primarily from the 1890s to the 1940s. It contains the bulk of Boas's own fieldwork material, with the main exception of most of his Inuit and earliest Northwest Coast fieldwork. It contains the majority of the work sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, which was directed by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and other academic linguists from 1927-1937. The collection, however, also contains related kinds of fieldwork and derived secondary materials created outside the auspices of this Committee, both earlier and later. The first deposit of the material arrivied in 1945. Subsequently, additional related materials were donated and added, as noted in the listings. Additionally, the documentary materials produced by some of the early projects (1945 to circa 1955) of the APS Phillips Fund for Native American Research were added to this collection. The collection has grown to over 80 linear feet of material representing at least 166 languages and dialects from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The formats range from field notes and ethnographic texts to slip files, vocabularies, lexica, and grammars, and dozens of linguists and Native consultants are represented.