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Native Americans work to revitalize California’s indigenous languages</h2></div><div class="lead-art entry-leadvimeo" style="padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:5px;margin-left:0px;border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-style:initial;border-color:initial;outline-width:0px;outline-style:initial;outline-color:initial;font-size:12px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-color:transparent;background-repeat:initial initial">
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California was once home to over 300 Native American dialects and as many as 90 languages, making it the most linguistically diverse state in the US. Today, only about half of those languages are still with us, according to the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, or AICLS.</p>
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“Many of the California tribes were really negatively impacted with the Gold Rush and tribes were devastated and a lot of the languages have been lost,” said Janeen Antoine, who teaches a language class at the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland. She teaches Lakota, which is spoken in South Dakota where she is from. “There’s a very strong effort within the California peoples to revive their languages.”</p>
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L. Frank Manriquez was a part of the California language revitalization movement, which began about 20 years ago, after many people noticed languages were disappearing with the eldest generation of fluent speakers. “We’ve been studied enough, now we have to learn,” said Manriquez who belongs to several Southern California tribes. “Sure there are scientists who are going to go deeper and deeper and find that vowel for us, but there’s enough out there for us natives to actually make language from.”</p>
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For over two decades, Manriquez has been visiting the archives at the Phoebe A. Heart Museum of Anthropology, which holds the largest collection of California Native American artifacts in the world, matching artifacts with language. She says it is common for many to become overwhelmed by the loss that these archives signify, but for her, she feels inspired to find each artifact’s meaning in her ancestors’ culture. She says she will look to neighboring tribes’ language if it something is no longer available in her own.</p>
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“It’s the most concrete tie to language that there is — these things, all of these pieces. Artifacts, they hold the language just as if they were a person holding the language,” said Manriquez. “It’s up to me then to work hard and get that language out of them.”</p>
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Access full article below:</p><p style="padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:18px;margin-left:0px;border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-style:initial;border-color:initial;outline-width:0px;outline-style:initial;outline-color:initial;font-size:14px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-color:transparent;line-height:22px;background-repeat:initial initial">
<a href="http://oaklandnorth.net/2012/07/23/native-americans-work-to-revitalize-californias-indigenous-languages/">http://oaklandnorth.net/2012/07/23/native-americans-work-to-revitalize-californias-indigenous-languages/</a></p>
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