A handheld that saves native languages? (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

A handheld that saves native languages?

by Sea Stachura, Minnesota Public Radio
March 6, 2007
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/03/05/phrasalator/

~
The Prairie Island Indian Community is using a US Defense Department
tool to try to revive its Dakota language. The Phraselator is used by
U.S. troops in the Middle East if they don't have an interpreter. To
use it, you say a phrase into the handheld device and it translates,
out loud.
~

Prairie Island Indian Community, Minn. — No one walks around Prairie
Island speaking Dakota, and only a few elders even know it. Wayne
Wells, a Dakota language teacher and tribal member, learned Dakota in
college, but he doesn't think he's fluent. Still, it's his goal to get
the tribe's children speaking Dakota everyday.

"My ancestors are breathing through my lungs when I speak the language,"
he says. "They're breathing again, they're living again through my soul,
my breath. It's precious. That's how I see it. And you start teaching
kids that, your ancestors are here still."
Larger view
Phraselator

Three years ago Wells started weekly language classes for adults and
kids. The Phraselator is a new addition. Wells shows how it works.

"Five," Wells says into the device. "Zapta," it responds. "So I can so
like, 'How are you,'" he continues. "Duke yahoe?" "That's how the
soldiers use it."

The tribe bought five. Each costs $3,300.

Wells wants kids to take these devices home. The hope is that a parent,
who doesn't speak Dakota, could have family dinner with the Phraselator
at his side. He could ask, "Please pass the rice," in the language. If a
child doesn't know the response, she also could use Phraselator to
figure it out.

[photo inset - Curt Campbell]

The device looks like a cross between a Palm Pilot and a walkie-talkie.
It retrieves language from a flash card full of recorded phrases. A one
gig card will store up to 85,000 items, but you have to enter them
yourself.

Curt Campbell is one of a few fluent elders. In Campbell's living room,
with photos of elders and grandchildren everywhere, Wells and Campbell
sit side by side, recording.

"Where do you go to school?" Wells reads from a phrase list.

"Okay," Campbell says.

"Ready? One, two, three..."

"Mis hed wabdawa," Campbell says into a headset microphone.

Campbell and Wells then record variations of this sentence. Then Wells
asks Campbell to say, "He goes to the University of Minnesota."

"I don't know if there is a word for university," Campbell laughs. "I'm
going to have to say a whole paragraph for this one."

"Well, what would you say?" Wells asks.

[photo inset - Alan Childs Jr.]

Campbell starts into a long description of an institute for higher
learning. He is 72 years old, and when elders like Campbell die, the
tribe loses people who know enough to apply the old language to new
words.

Tribal member Alan Childs watches the activity. He says speaking Dakota
teaches self-worth.

"Other than being brown-skinned and darker features and things like
that, [language] is our identity. That is our number one identity. And
it's also how we keep our customs and traditions," Childs explains.

Fifty-five tribes bought Phraselators in the last year.

But University of Minnesota linguist Nancy Stenson says preserving
language doesn't need fancy gadgets. She believes technological tools
frequently become a linguistic crutch.

"I think there's a danger there in that people will abdicate personal
responsibility for language," she says.

[photo inset - Nancy Stenson]

Stenson says people may think, if it's recorded, it's safe. But she says
recorded language is fossilized language.

"I think the way a language is going to be preserved and brought back
into common use is by speaking it to other people, and only by speaking
it, even to people who maybe don't have a good command," she says.

The Mohawk, for example, decided to use Mohawk in all public places,
including the grocery store. Some Ojibwe bands write Ojibwe rock songs
and have immersion programs. Stenson says these types of programs keep
language buoyant and flexible.

She says people don't learn languages in chunks but by applying rules.
Without those rules, new speakers are stuck when they try to say a
unrecorded phrase.

Wayne Wells says the Phraselator is only a tool. In the last three years
he says he's seen progress in his students.

"I was discouraged for a little while, because it was like, they're
never gonna get this," he says during a break from recording. "But
then, all of a sudden, they started speaking. Another milestone is, the
intermediate kids that have been coming for a couple years? They're
teaching the beginning class now."

Those intermediate kids are 11 years old.