Warm Springs, Oregon
SpilyayTymoo
Ichishkiin, Numu and Kiksht Language Lessons
Merry Christmas
from the Language Staff,
Consultants and Volunteers
6 December 14, 2000
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Arlita Rhoan Christina Abrco Suzie Slockish
Pat Miller Shirley Tufti Jeanne Thomas
Madeline
Mclnturff
Gladys
Thompson
Elaine
Clements
Dallas Winishut Anna Clements Myra Shawaway
Rudy Clements Deanie Johnson Valerie Aguilar
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Used by permission of Highlights for Children, Inc. Columbus, Ohio. Copyrighted material.
DEAD LANGUAGE DEBATE
reprinted of New York Times
September 30, 2(KX) Saturday
ALEXANDER STILLE
Over the last seven years, Jessie Utile Doe Fermino, a member of
the Mashpec tribe on Cape Cod, has been on a single- minded mission to
revive the language of her ancestors, Wampanoag, the one that greeted the
Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock and that gave the state of
Massachusetts its name. But when she applied to the National Endowment
of the Humanities for a grant to create a Wampanoag dictionary, she was
turned down.
The apparent reasons: the Wampanoag language has not been
used in about 100 years, the known descendants of the original speakers
number only 2,500 and Ms. Fermino is trying to make a spoken language
out of a language that until recently existed only in documents, many of
them from the 17th century.
"We got great reviews from the specialists, but the panel of non
specialists hated it," Ms. Fermino said. Daryl Baldwin, who is reviving
the language of the Miami Nation in Indiana and raising his children in it,
said he had met with a similar mixture of encouragement and skepticism:
"I've run into people who say. Til give you an "A" for effort, but you're
never going to revive that language.' " The last native speaker died in
1962, leaving no audiotapes of his speech, so Mr. Baldwin had to go to
graduate school in linguistics and work from documents to try to create a
Miami grammar and recreate the spoken language.
In the face of doubts and many difficulties, the revival of
indigenous languages is a growing movement among Native American
groups from Hawaii to Cape Cod, and it is fast becoming a new
subspeciality in the field of linguistics as well. "We no longer use the term
'dead' language 6 we now speak of them as 'dormant,' " said Leanne
Hinton, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at
Berkeley, which recently sponsored its fourth annual "Breath of Life
California Language Restoration Workshop." Participants in the workshop
are busy preparing dictionaries, grammars and education programs.
Similar initiatives have taken root at the Universities of Arizona and
Oregon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There are 21 1 indigenous languages still extant throughout the
United States and Canada, but only 20 of them are spoken by the youngest
generation of their communities. The rest may well face oblivion in the
next 50 years. Only one, Navajo, has more than 100,000 speakers, and it,
too, is declining among the young. "AH 21 1 are in danger of extinction,"
said Akira Yamamoto, a professor of linguistics at the University of
Kansas who works each summer at the University of Arizona's language
reclamation institute.
But even as the language revival movement is picking up steam,
some scholars outside of linguistics are questioning whether people should
try to save endangered languages at all. "Languages have died throughout
human history 6 our own language bears little resemblance to the English
of the 1 5th century," said Michael Blake, a professor of philosophy at
Harvard University, who recently published a broadside attack on the
movement to protect endangered cultures in Civilization magazine. "It is
not immediately clear to me why we should try to preserve them," he said . .
in a telephone interview.
One reason, Mr. Yamamoto said, is aesthetic: languages, like
animal species, contribute to the richness and diversity of the world: "If
you speak English, you have one world; if you speak Navajo, you have
another world." For example, Mr. Yamamoto points out, in the Algonquin
family of languages, noun endings are divided into two basic categories:
animate and inanimate.
So, while Romance languages separate nouns by gender, the
Algonquin sees the world in terms of things that have spirit and things that
do not. And, Mr. Yamamoto adds, "This is reflected in their culture."
Mr. Blake said it might be sad to lose languages but that some
times it is a necessary price to pay for progress and freedom of choice in
society: "I think we can acknowledge a sense of loss, but I think these are
losses that we suffer as a free people, when we decide what norms to
adopt and to leave behind. There are reasons that these languages are
dying out, that members of these communities have decided to assimilate,
and those reasons have to be respected, too."
But supporters of language revival respond that the idea of
"freedom of choice" is highly problematic, especially in the case of
American Indian languages, which were frequently aggressively sup
pressed. "As an Indian, to hear about languages 'dying' or becoming
'extinct' hits at our core," said Mr. Baldwin. "The federal government has
always wanted Indian people either to become extinct or to assimilate."
The history of the Hawaiian language is an example. It was
spoken almost universally in Hawaii until the islands were annexed by the
United States in 1898. The Hawaiians had adapted their language to
written form, used it as the language of government and begun translating
much of world literature into it. But with annexation, Hawaiian was
suppressed. It had dwindled to about 1,500 fluent native speakers by the
1 980 's, when a group of professors at the University of Hawaii at Hilo
began a concerted effort to reclaim it. They set up a preschool in which
elderly Hawaiian speakers taught the language to the children. Gradually,
by adding a new grade each year, they succeeded in creating a preschool-to-high
school system in which Hawaiian is the primary language of
instruction.
But wouldn't it be more useful for young Hawaiians to learn
languages like Spanish or French, which are spoken by millions of people,
rather than a language used by only a few thousand? And are language
revival programs holding youngsters back from acquiring the skills they
need to succeed in mainstream society? Mr. Blake said that the children
"are going to lose some of the opportunity that English education gives
them."
Advocates answer that students in the Hawaiian program score
slightly higher in standardized tests than native Hawaiian students from
English-language schools. And the program's first graduates to enter '
college all passed their English composition tests.
Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University, is a
frequent critic of progressive educational fads, but she has a strongly
positive view of language revival. "I think cultural retrieval is an impor
tant thing that people need to go through, as long as it is voluntary and the
children also learn English, which they need to go to college," she said.
"The language sustains their culture and their link with the past, which is
an important aspect of who we are."
Ms. Rav itch pointed out that her own grandchildren w ere
attending a school w here instruction is half Hebrew and half English. "The
revival of Hebrew is one of the great stories of linguistics of modern
times," she said, adding: "I find the argument that we should do nothing to
preserve languages and culture toxic. Otherw ise, we are just left w ith mass
culture, pop culture and the whims of the marketplace."
Many thanks My ra for providing these exerpts.
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