Fwd: L.A. Times - The Struggle to Save Dying Languages

[David Lewis]

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>To: kanakamaoliallies-l at hawaii.edu
>From: Scott Crawford <scott at aloha.net>
>Subject: L.A. Times - The Struggle to Save Dying Languages
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>Date:   Tue, 25 Jan 2000 23:04:37 -1000
>
>Los Angeles Times
>
>Tuesday, January 25, 2000
>Home Edition
>Section: PART A
>Page: A-1
>
>The Struggle to Save Dying Languages
>
>Global pressures threaten them, but more voices are being raised to keep
>them alive.
>
>ISLANDS OF THE MIND How Language Shapes Our World. Last in a three-part series
>
>By: ROBERT LEE HOTZ
>TIMES SCIENCE WRITER
>
>HILO, HAWAII -- It was not the teachers bearing baskets of feather leis,
>the fanfares played on conch shells or the beating of the sacred sharkskin
>drum that made Hulilauakea Wilson's high school graduation so memorable.
>
>It was this: For the first time in a century, a child of the islands had
>been educated exclusively in his native Hawaiian language, immersed from
>birth in a special way of speaking his mind like a tropical fish steeped
>in the salt waters of its nativity.
>
>It was a language being reborn.
>
>More than an academic rite of passage, the graduation last May of Wilson
>and four other students at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School on the Big
>Island of Hawaii signaled a coming of age for one of the world's most
>ambitious efforts to bring an endangered language back from the brink of
>extinction.
>
>The world has become a hospice for dying languages, which are succumbing
>to the pressure of global commerce, telecommunications, tourism, and the
>inescapable influence of English. By the most reliable estimates, more
>than half of the world's 6,500 languages may be extinct by the end of this
>century.
>
>"The number of languages is plummeting, imploding downward in an
>altogether unprecedented rate, just as human population is shooting
>straight upward," said University of Alaska linguist Michael Krauss.
>
>But scattered across the globe, many ethnic groups are struggling to find
>their own voice, even at the risk of making their dealings with the
>broader world they inhabit more fractious.
>
> From the Hoklo and Hakka in Hong Kong to the Euskara in Spain's Basque
> country, thousands of minority languages are clinging precariously to
> existence. A few, like Hebrew and Gaelic, have been rejuvenated as part
> of resurgent nationalism. Indeed, so important is language to political
> and personal self-determination that a people's right to speak its mind
> in the language of its choice is becoming an international human right.
>
>California once had the densest concentration of indigenous languages in
>North America. Today, almost every one of its 50 or so surviving native
>languages is on its deathbed. Indeed, the last fluent speaker of Chumash,
>a family of six languages once heard throughout Southern California and
>the West, is a professional linguist at UC Santa Barbara.
>
>More people in California speak Mongolian at home than speak any of the
>state's most endangered indigenous languages.
>
>"Not one of them is spoken by children at home," said UC Berkeley linguist
>Leanne Hinton.
>
>None of this happened by accident.
>
>All Native American languages, as well as Hawaiian, were for a century the
>target of government policies designed to eradicate them in public and in
>private, to ensure that they were not passed from parent to child.
>
>Until 1987, it was illegal to teach Hawaiian in the islands' public
>schools except as a foreign language. The language that once claimed the
>highest literacy rate in the world was banned even from the islands'
>private schools.
>
>Indeed, there may be no more powerful testimony to the visceral importance
>of language than the government's systematic efforts to destroy all the
>indigenous languages in the United States and replace them with English.
>
>No language in memory, except Spanish, has sought so forcefully to
>colonize the mind. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the territorial
>United States when Columbus made landfall in 1492, only 175 are still
>spoken. Of those, only 20 are being passed on to children.
>
>In 1868, a federal commission on Indian affairs concluded: "In the
>difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. . . . Their
>barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language
>substituted." The commission reasoned that "through sameness of language
>is produced sameness of sentiment, and thought. . . . In process of time
>the differences producing trouble would have been gradually obliterated."
>
>Not until 1990 did the federal government reverse its official hostility
>to indigenous languages, when the Native American Languages Act made it a
>policy to preserve native tongues.
>
>Policies against indigenous languages were once in effect in many
>developed nations. Only the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended
>that government's efforts to force its ethnic minorities to adopt Russian.
>Policies in other nations aimed at eliminating minority languages such as
>Catalan in Spain, Kurdish in Turkey, Inuktitut in Canada and Lardio in
>Australia, to name just a few.
>
>Silencing a language does much more than eliminate a source of
>"differences producing trouble."
>
>A language embodies a community of people and their way of being. It is a
>unique mental framework that gives special form to universal human
>experiences. Languages are the most complex products of the human mind,
>each differing enormously in its sounds, structure and pattern of thought,
>said UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond.
>
>As a prism through which perceptions are reflected, there is almost no end
>to the variations.
>
>In some languages, gender plays a relatively minor role, allowing sexually
>neutral forms of personal pronouns, and in others it is so overriding that
>men and women must use completely different forms of speech. Other tongues
>infuse every phrase with the structure of ownership, while others make
>cooperation a key grammatical rule. Some see only a category where another
>sees the individuals that constitute it.
>
>There are languages in which verities of time, cardinal directions, even
>left and right--as English conceives them--are almost wholly absent.
>
>"If we ever want to understand how the human mind works, we really want to
>know all the kinds of ways that have evolved for making sense out of the
>kaleidoscope of experience," said linguist Marianne Mithun at UC Santa
>Barbara. Suffocating in Silence
>
>More than an ocean separates Katherine Silva Saubel on the Morongo
>Reservation at the foot of the arid, wind-swept San Gorgonio Pass near
>Banning from the language renaissance underway in Hawaii.
>
>The silence suffocating many languages is almost tangible in her darkened,
>cinder-block living room. There, in a worn beige recliner flanked by a fax
>machine, a treadmill and a personal computer, Saubel, a 79-year-old
>Cahuilla Indian activist and scholar, marshals her resistance to time and
>the inroads of English.
>
>Saubel is the last fluent speaker of her native tongue on this reservation.
>
>"Since my husband died," she said, "there is no one here I can converse with."
>
>For 50 years, this broad-shouldered great-grandmother has worked almost
>single-handedly to ensure the survival of Cahuilla.
>
>Her efforts earned her a place in the National Women's Hall of Fame and a
>certificate of merit from the state Indian Museum in Sacramento. Even so,
>her language is slipping away.
>
>"I wanted to teach the children the language, but their mothers wanted
>them to know English. A lot of them want the language taught to them now,"
>Saubel said. "Maybe it will revive."
>
>If it does, it will be a recovery based almost solely on the memories she
>has pronounced and defined for academic tape recorders, the words she has
>filed in the only known dictionary of Cahuilla, and the songs she has
>helped commit to living tribal memory. Tribal artifacts and memorabilia
>are housed in the nearby Makli Museum that she founded, the first in North
>America to be organized and managed by Native Americans.
>
>Born on the Los Coyotes Reservation east of Warm Springs, Saubel did not
>even see a white person until she was 4 years old--"I thought he was
>sick," she recalled--and English had no place in her world until she was 7.
>
>Then her mother--who spoke neither English nor Spanish--sent her to a
>public school.
>
>She was, she recalled, the only Indian girl in the classroom. She could
>not speak English. No one tried to teach her to speak the language, she
>said. Mostly, she was ignored.
>
>"I would speak to them in the Indian language and they would answer me in
>English. I don't remember when I began to understand what was being said
>to me," Saubel said. "Maybe a year."
>
>Even so, by eighth grade she had discovered a love of learning that led
>her to become the first Indian woman to graduate from Palm Springs High
>School. But she also saw the other Indian children taken aside at recess
>and whipped if they spoke their language in school.
>
>In time, the child of an Indian medicine woman became an ethno-botanist.
>
>For linguists as far away as Germany and Japan, she became both a research
>subject and a collaborator. She is working now with UC San Diego
>researchers to catalog all the medicinal plants identified in tribal lore.
>
>"My race is dying," she said. "I am saving the remnants of my culture in
>these books.
>
>"I am just a voice in the wilderness all by myself," Saubel said. "But I
>have made these books as something for my great-grandchildren. And I have
>great-grandchildren."
>
>In its broadest outlines, her life is a refrain repeated on many mainland
>reservations.
>
>"Basically, every American Indian language is endangered," said Douglas
>Whalen at Yale University's Haskins Laboratory, who is chairman of the
>Endangered Languages Fund.
>
>As a matter of policy, Native American families often were broken up to
>keep children from learning to speak like their parents. Indian boarding
>schools, founded in the last century to implement that policy, left
>generations of Indians with no direct connection to their language or
>tribal cultures.
>
>Today, the federal Administration for Native Americans dispenses about $2
>million in language grants to tribes every year.
>
>But even the best efforts to preserve the skeletons of grammar, vocabulary
>and syntax cannot breathe life into a language that its people have abandoned.
>
>Still, from the Kuruk of Northern California to the Chitimacha of
>Louisiana and the Abenaki of Vermont, dozens of tribes are trying to
>rekindle their languages.
>
>Mohawk is taught in upstate New York, Lakota on the Oglala Sioux
>reservation in South Dakota, Ute in Utah, Choctaw in Mississippi, and
>Kickapoo in Oklahoma. The Navajo Nation--with 80,000 native speakers--has
>its own comprehensive, college-level training to produce Navajo-speaking
>teachers for the 240 schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah that have
>large numbers of Navajo students.
>
>Some tribes, acknowledging that too few tribal members still speak their
>language, have switched to English for official business while trying to
>give children a feel for the words and catch-phrases of their native language.
>
>Even when instruction falls short of achieving fluency, it can inspire
>pride that, in turn, translates into lower school dropout rates and
>improved test scores, several experts said.
>
>Like the Hawaiian students, Mohawk children near Montreal, who are taught
>in their native language, do better academically than their tribal
>schoolmates taught in English.
>
>But revitalization efforts often founder on the political geography of the
>reservation system, economic pressure and the language gap that divides
>grandparent from grandchild.
>
>As many tribes assert the prerogatives of sovereignty for the first time
>in generations, some tribal leaders are jarred to discover themselves more
>at ease in English than in the language of their ancestors.
>
>"Often people who are now in power in Indian communities are the first
>generation that does not speak the language, and it can be very, very hard
>for them," Mithun at UC Santa Barbara said. "It is hard to be an Indian
>and not being able to prove it with language. You have to be a big person
>to say I want my kids to be more Indian than I am."
>
>When people do break through to fluency, they tap a hidden wellspring of
>community.
>
>"I was in my own language, not just saying the words, but my own
>thoughts," said Nancy Steele of Crescent City, an advanced apprentice in
>the Karuk language.
>
>"It is a way of being, something that has been here for a long, long time,
>a sense of balance with the world." An All-Out Effort to Save Hawaiian
>
>The effort to revive Hawaiian today is a cultural battle for hearts and
>minds waged with dictionaries, Internet sites, children's books, videos,
>multimedia databases and radio broadcasts. At its forefront are a handful
>of parents and educators determined to remake Hawaiian into a language in
>which every aspect of modern life--from rocket science to rap--can be
>expressed.
>
>Spearheading the revival is a nonprofit foundation called the Aha Punano
>Leo, which means the "language nest" in Hawaiian.
>
>Inspired by the Maori of New Zealand and the Mohawks of Canada, Punano Leo
>teachers use the immersion approach, in which only the language being
>learned is used throughout the school day.
>
>In 15 years, the Punano Leo has grown from a few volunteers running a
>preschool with 12 students to a $5-million-a-year enterprise with 130
>employees that encompasses 11 private Hawaiian language schools, the
>world's most sophisticated native language computer network, and millions
>in university scholarships.
>
>It works in partnership with the state department of education, which now
>operates 16 public Hawaiian language schools, and the University of
>Hawaii, which recently established the first Hawaiian language college in Hilo.
>
>So far, it is succeeding most in the place where so many other
>revitalization efforts have failed: in the homes that, all too often, are
>the first place a language begins to die.
>
>To enroll their children in a Punano Leo immersion school, parents must
>pledge to also become fluent in Hawaiian and promise that only Hawaiian
>will be spoken at home.
>
>The effort arose from the frustration of seven Hawaiian language teachers,
>amid a general political reawakening of Hawaiian native rights, and one
>couple's promise to an unborn child.
>
>The couple was University of Hawaii linguist William H. Wilson and
>Hawaiian language expert Kauanoe Kamana, who today is president of Punano
>Leo and principal of the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School.
>
>The child was their son: 1999 graduating senior Hulilauakea Wilson. Their
>daughter Keli'i will graduate next year.
>
>"When we married, my wife and I decided we wanted to use Hawaiian when our
>children were born because no one was speaking it," William Wilson said.
>
>"It was a personal thing for us. We were building the schools for us,
>almost, as well as for other people. We started with a preschool and now
>they are in college."
>
>They planted the seed of a language revival and cultivated it.
>
>Like many others, Wilson and Kamana were frustrated that Hawaiian could be
>taught only as a foreign language, even though it was, along with English,
>the official language of a state in which the linguistic landscape had
>been redrawn repeatedly by annexation, immigration and tourism.
>
>It must compete with more than 16 languages today to retain a foothold in
>the island state, from Japanese and Spanish to Tagalog and Portuguese.
>Hawaiian ranks only eighth in its homeland, census figures show, trailing
>Samoan in the number of households where it can be heard.
>
>It was not always so.
>
>Although Hawaiian did not even acquire an alphabet until the early 1800s,
>the islanders' appetite for their language proved so insatiable that
>missionary presses produced about 150 million pages of Hawaiian text
>between 1820 and 1850. At least 150 Hawaiian-language newspapers also thrived.
>
>In 1880, there were 150 schools teaching in Hawaiian. A decade
>later--after the islands were forcibly annexed by the U.S.--there were none.
>
>As part of a small group of committed language teachers, inspired by
>influential University of Hawaii linguist Larry Kimura, Wilson and and
>Kamana vowed to restore the language to a central place among Hawaiians.
>
>"This is the most exciting thing I can do for my people," Kamana said of
>the foundation's mission. "This is the core of Hawaiian identity: the
>Hawaiian way. The Hawaiian language is the code of that way." Updating Old
>Language With New Vocabulary
>
>Many reviving languages, however, face the new world of the 21st century
>with a 19th century vocabulary.
>
>"A living language means you have to be able to talk about everything,"
>said Kamana. "If you can't talk about everything, you will talk in
>English. It is simple."
>
>The task of updating Hawaiian falls to a group called the Lexicon Committee.
>
>Once a year, the committee issues a bright yellow dictionary called the
>Mamaka Kaiao, which defines new words created to fill gaps in Hawaiian's
>knowledge of the contemporary world, from a noun for the space shuttle's
>manned maneuvering unit--ahikao ha awe--to a term for coherent laser
>light: malamalama aukahi.
>
>This year's edition runs to 311 pages, with 4,000 terms. A is for aeolele:
>pogo stick; Z is for Zimababue: a citizen of Zimbabwe.
>
>Whenever possible, the new words relate to traditional vocabulary and
>customs. The Hawaiian word for rap music--Paleoleo--refers to warring
>factions who would trade taunts. The word for e-mail--Lika uila--merges
>words for lightning and letter. The word for pager-- Kele' O--echoes the
>idea of calling someone's name.
>
>Like so many other aspects of the Hawaiian language revival--from
>translating the state educational curriculum to organizing an accredited
>school system--the committee has the authority to shape the future of
>Hawaiian only because its linguists, native speakers and volunteers simply
>started doing it.
>
>"It exists; that is its authority," said Wilson.
>
>But many of those whose languages are undergoing such resuscitation
>efforts don't want to accommodate the present.
>
>They worry that grafting new verbs and nouns will violate the sanctity of
>the ancient language they hope will draw them back into a world of their own.
>
>At Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, where the Keresan language is spoken,
>the tribal council decided in 1997 that it would not develop a written
>form of the language. The language itself was a sacred text too closely
>tied to the pueblo's religion and traditional societies to be changed in
>any way.
>
>Under the onslaught of new technology and new customs, however, even the
>most well-established languages are pushed off balance by the natural
>evolution of words and grammar.
>
>Certainly, the 40 intellectuals of the Academie Francaise in Paris and the
>Office de la Langue Francaise in Quebec are fiercely resisting the inroads
>of Franglais, as a matter of national pride and linguistic purity.
>
>But a thousand leaks spring from the linguistic dikes they maintain with
>such determination, if not from the engineering patter of the Internet,
>then from the international slang of sports.
>
>Recently, the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris started publishing
>its three most important scientific journals in English. Earlier this
>year, the Quebec French office felt obliged to post an officially approved
>dictionary of French substitutes for English golf terms.
>
>In the same way, many indigenous tribes feel that their native tongues
>must be made to encompass every aspect of a world that continued to change
>long after the language itself stagnated.
>
>The vocabulary of Karuk stopped growing naturally more than half a century
>ago, said Nancy Steele. Even the words for auto parts stopped with the
>models of the 1930s.
>
>As her tribe coins words today, they reflect the spirit of their language.
>The new Karuk word for wristwatch, for example, translates as "little sun
>worn on the wrist."
>
>"If you do not allow a language to be spoken as a living language," Steele
>said, "it will, in a sense, be a dead language. You have to allow it to be
>alive and animated." Schools Funded by Donations, Grants
>
>In eighth-grade science class, Hui Hui Mossman's students are conducting
>germination experiments.
>
>Down the hall, Kaleihoku Kala'i's math class wrestles with the arithmetic
>of medians and averages. In social studies class, Lehua Veincent taps the
>floor with a yardstick for emphasis as his students recite their family
>genealogies.
>
>And Caroline Fallau is teaching her 13 11th-graders English--as a foreign
>language.
>
>So the school day hits its stride at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u immersion
>high school, where 84 teenagers, with only an occasional adolescent yawn,
>are hitting the books.
>
>But for the sound of Hawaiian in the hallways, computer workstations and
>classrooms, this could be any well-funded private school in America.
>
>The appearance of prosperity is deceptive.
>
>The Punano Leo schools are sustained year to year by a fragile patchwork
>of donations, state education aid and federal grants. The lush,
>well-manicured campus, with its complex of immaculate blue classroom
>buildings, itself is the work of parent volunteers, aided by an island
>flora in which even the weeds are as ornamental as orchids.
>
>Several miles away, the younger children are arriving at the public
>Keukaha Elementary School, which offers both English and Hawaiian
>immersion classes under one roof.
>
>Those in English classes walk directly to their homerooms, while the
>Hawaiian immersion students--almost half the school--gather in nine rows
>on the school steps for a morning ceremony. Chanting in their native
>language, they formally seek permission to enter and affirm their
>commitment to their community.
>
>They will not encounter English as a subject until fifth grade, where it
>will be taught one hour a day.
>
>Running an elementary school with two languages "is a delicate balance and
>not always an easy one," said Principal Katharine Webster. There is
>competition for resources and the demand for immersion classes increases
>every year, while--in a depressed island economy--the education budget
>does not, she said.
>
>"Teaching in an immersion environment is not easy at all," said
>third-grade teacher Leimaile Bontag.
>
>"You spend weekends and hours after school to prepare lessons. We often
>need to translate on our own, find the new vocabulary. It takes hours and
>hours."
>
>But it is a proud complaint.
>
>Clearly, the teachers are sustained by their love for Hawaiian and the
>community it has fostered. And it appears to be having a beneficial effect
>on the native Hawaiian students, who traditionally test at the bottom of
>the educational system and have the highest dropout rate.
>
>Given the difficulty in comparing the language groups, an objective
>yardstick of student performance is hard to come by.
>
>But one set of Stanford Achievement Tests taken by sixth-graders at
>Keukaha Elementary educated since preschool in Hawaiian suggests that they
>are doing as well or better than their schoolmates.
>
>In tests given in English, all of the Hawaiian-educated students scored
>average or above in math while only two-thirds of the students in
>all-English classes scored as well. In reading, two-thirds of
>Hawaiian-educated students scored average or above, compared to half of
>the English-educated students. Getting an Early Start on Hawaiian
>
>In the shade of the African tulip trees, Kaipua'ala Crabbe is leading 22
>toddlers in song: a lilting Hawaiian translation of "Twinkle, Twinkle,
>Little Star."
>
>Four other teachers and two university students help the children
>pronounce the Hawaiian lyrics at the Punano Leo immersion preschool in Hilo.
>
>Hulilauakea Wilson, who volunteers regularly at the preschool when he is
>not attending university classes, helps a little boy tie his shoes. The
>child climbs onto his lap and listens attentively, not yet sure of the
>meaning of every word he hears in school.
>
>"Every child reacts differently," said Alohalani Housman, who has been
>teaching Hawaiian immersion classes for 13 years. "The students might
>listen for months and not say anything. But all of them soon become speakers."
>
>And so the seeds of a language revival are cultivated.
>
>"It is the language of this land," young Wilson said. "It is like growing
>the native plants. This is their land. We are the plants of this land too."
>
>The success of the Hawaiian program raises a larger question of longevity:
>How well can such diverse languages coexist and how much should the
>majority culture do to accommodate them?
>
>Foundation officials and parents said their embrace of Hawaiian is no
>rejection of English. They are only insisting on their right to be
>bilingual, determined to ensure that Hawaiian is their first language of
>the heart.
>
>"Everybody is so concerned about whether they are going to learn English
>and whether we are parenting them properly," said Kau Ontai, cradling her
>2-year-old daughter Kamalei in one arm.
>
>Her two older children attend the Punano Leo preschool. Her husband
>teaches the language. She studied it in high school, then achieved fluency
>as a Punano Leo volunteer.
>
>Hawaiian is the voice of their home, yet the native language they speak
>marks them as alien to many in their island homeland.
>
>"When we walk through a mall in Hawaii speaking Hawaiian, people are
>shocked," she said. "They stop us and ask: What about English? We hear
>Chinese being spoken, Japanese spoken, Filipino spoken. Nobody ever stops
>them in their tracks and says why are you speaking that?
>
>"For now, their first and only language is Hawaiian," she said of her
>children.
>
>She is confident that they will learn English easily enough when the time
>comes.
>
>"But my husband and I will never look into our children's eyes and speak
>English to them," she said. "That is something I could never do."
>
>(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC) About This Series
>
>Islands of distinct languages dot the Southern California landscape,
>shaping our society. Islands of nerve cells in the brain control how we
>speak. The world's endangered languages are isolated islands ever in peril
>of being overwhelmed. This series explores how language shapes our world
>and the new discoveries that shape our understanding of language.
>
>Sunday: Southern California's present may be the world's linguistic
>future: English dominant, but coexisting with scores of other tongues.
>
>Monday: New research on how the brain handles language guides the
>surgeon's knife to save life and speech.
>
>Today: More than 3,000 languages worldwide are in danger of disappearing,
>but dogged supporters are bringing some back from the brink.
>
>(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC) Losing California's Languages
>
>Of 100 Native American languages once spoken in California, 50 have been
>wiped out completely. An additional 17 have no fluent speakers. The
>remainder are spoken by only a few people. The map shows the surviving
>languages, the areas in which they are spoken and the number of native
>speakers.
>
>Source: "Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages," by Leanne
>Hinton
>
>(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC) Many Tongues
>
>Total number of languages worldwide: 6,528
>
>Language distribution
>
>Asia: 31%
>
>Africa: 31%
>
>Pacific: 21%
>
>Americas: 15%
>
>Europe: 3%
>
>*
>
>Top 10 language families, in numbers of current speakers
>
>Indo-European: 2 billion
>
>Sino-Tibetan: 1.04 billion
>
>Niger-Congo: 260 million
>
>Afro-Asiatic: 230 million
>
>Austronesian: 200 million
>
>Dravidian (India): 140 million
>
>Japanese: 120 million
>
>Altaic (Central Asia): 90 million
>
>Austro-Asiatic: 60 million
>
>Korean: 60 million
>
>*
>
>Top 10 states by percentage of people who speak a language other than
>English at home:
>
>New Mexico: 36%
>
>California: 32%
>
>Texas: 25%
>
>Hawaii: 25%
>
>New York: 23%
>
>Arizona: 21%
>
>New Jersey: 20%
>
>Florida: 17%
>
>Rhode Island: 17%
>
>Connecticut: 15%
>
>*
>
>ENDANGERED VOIVES
>
>When you lose a language, it's like dropping a bomb on a museum. Kenneth
>Hale, linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
>
>Native American languages when Columbus landed: 300
>
>Number spoken today: 175
>
>Still spoken in homes by children: 20
>
>Where: Mostly in New Mexico and Arizona
>
>Examples: Navajo, Western Apache, Hopi, Zuni, Havasupai-Hualapai
>
>Still spoken by parents and elders: 30
>
>Where: Montana, Iowa, Alaska
>
>Examples: Crow and Cheyenne, Mesquakie, Jicarilla Apache
>
>Spoken only by elders: 70
>
>Where: California, Alaska, Oregon, Maine, Washington
>
>Examples: Tlingit, Passamaquoddy, Winnebago, Comanche, Yuma, Nez Perce,
>Kalispel, Yakima, Makah
>
>Spoken by fewer than 10 elders: 55
>
>Where: California, Washington, Iowa, North Dakota
>
>Examples: Eyak, Mandan, Pawnee, Wichita, Omaha, Washoe
>
>*
>
>LANGUAGES ON THE WEB
>
>Total online users: 257.5 million
>
>Language use online
>
>Foreign-language use online
>
>Language Web sites:
>
>The Endangered Language Fund: http://sapir.ling.yale.edu/~elf/index.html
>Ethnologue: Languages of the World: http://www.sil.org/ethnologue
>The Human Languages Page: http://www.june29.com/HLP
>Native American Languages: http://www.mcn.net/~wleman/langlinks.htm
>Teaching Indigenuous Languages: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL.html
>Kualono Hawaiian Web Site: http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu
>The Aha Punano Leo Home Page: http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/OP/orgs/apl
>Babelfish Web Translator:
>http://doc.altavista.com/help/search/babel_tool.shtml
>
>Sources: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Global Reach
>(www.glreach.com); University of Alaska; U.S. Census Bureau; Times staff
>
>Researched by NONA YATES, DOUG SMITH and ROBERT LEE HOTZ/Los Angeles Times In
>
>(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC) In Translation
>
>The first paragraphs of today's story, translated into Hawaiian:
>
>Sources: University of Hawaii, Hilo, translation by Prof Larry Kimura of
>University of Hawaii at Hilo
>
>
>
>PHOTO: Hulilauakea Wilson now volunteers at the preschool where he
>
>was taught exclusively in Hawaiian.
>
>PHOTOGRAPHER: RICK MEYER / Los Angeles Times
>
>PHOTO: Katherine Silva Saubel is an Indian scholar on the Morongo
>
>Reservation who hopes to save the dying Cahuilla language. She holds a
>
>1920 photo showing an Indian meeting.
>
>PHOTO: (2 photos) Teacher Kaipua'ala Crabbe and pupils, above, sing
>
>at a Hawaiian immersion preschool. At right, notes on Hawaiian words for
>
>modern topics.
>
>PHOTOGRAPHER: RICK MEYER / Los Angeles Times
>
>GRAPHIC: Many Tongues, LYNN MEERSMAN / Los Angeles Times
>
>GRAPHIC: Losing California's Languages, HELENE WEBB / Los Angeles
>
>Times
>
>GRAPHIC: In Translation, Los Angeles Times
>
>GRAPHIC-MAP: California
>
>Type of Material: One in a Series; Mainbar
>
>Descriptors: LANGUAGES; DIALECTS; ETHNIC GROUPS; TRENDS; STATISTICS;
>
>
>
>
>Copyright (c) 2000 Times Mirror Company

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