Ethnonyms (was: Nuxalk) [lengthy...]

[Henry Kammler]

Several remarkable phenomena have been touched by this little conversation. The
imposition of a European notion of "nation", the need to be an identifyable
entitity in the legal and political conflicts and the right to at least define
how they want to be called has forced many native communities to coin over-
arching ethnonyms for themselves, mostly along linguistic boundaries.

In the cases of the Nuuchaahnulth and the Kwakwaka'wakw their respective former
designations "Nootka" and "Kwakiutl" were simply an extension of the name of a
specific location or group. The Nuuchaahnulth actually use "Nootka", but *only*
to refer to the Mowachat band's home ("he's a Mowachat" or "he's FROM Nootka").
When they established a tribal council in 1958, they adopted the name "West
Coast Tribes" because the only generic *tradtional* selfdesignation would
be /quu?as/ "person" which can also include other 1st Nations (but not whites) -
not suitable if you have to be distinguishable in the eyes of the ignorant
government. 20 years later, in the vein of symbolic de-colonization, "Nuu-chah-
nulth" (=/nuu¢aa'nul~/ "all along the mountains") was coined to replace "West
Coast". In a similar way, Kwakwakw'wakw "speakers of /kwak'wala/" was adopted
by these, also to make clear that the Heiltsuk & Ooweekeno are not "Northern
Kwakiutl" because they do not speak /kwak'wala/.

While the written might be a bit nasty, it's OK, the problem is pronouncing
these names. As the languages in question face a painful process of extinction
(I don't know of any successful language program in BC that would produce a
significant number of fluent speakers among the young ones, except for the
interior nations where some children still learn the language at home), the
people themselves have a problem with these names because most are monolingual
in English. Though [kw0kw0:kye'w0k] (0 = very open /o/) is pronounced well by
the locals, [nu:¢a:'nul~] has three traps: the plain long /a/ becomes open /e/,
glottalized /'n/ becomes plain /n/ and voiceless lateral /l~/ becomes
English /l/ (with velar contraction) plus English /th/. Considering the rule
that an ethnonym including a place name should end in /-?atH/ or /-taqiml~/ in
Nuuchaahnulth, it becomes clear that the majority of the tribe's members are
neither phonetically nor morphologically capable of pronouncing their nation's
own name "correctly" -- sounds horrible at least for those concerned
with "authenticity" (which I'm not). So this sheds some light on the case
of /st'at'imc/ versus /stl'atl'imc/ - the symbolic power lies within the fact
that it looks non-English, not in how it is actually pronounced, as an
untrained English speaker cannot make a distinction between /t'/ and /tl'/
anyway.

Why should this be interesting for CJers? Well, it leads to questions of
language didactitcs for adults. While in some communities still some bitching
is going on about the "correct" spelling for a given language, hardly enough
time is spent on improving the phonetics in adult learners in a systematic way.
But as long as they will have to recognize their inability to produce certain
sounds the students will be inhibited to actually talk. It takes very well
trained instructors to help people with the pronounciation while it is totally
arbitrary e.g. whether you write the glottal stop with its phonetic symbol
or /7/ or /?/ or /'/ as long it is clear that this is a glottal stop. If the
language shall not only survive as a folkloristic source of odd-looking
writings in public places (which are of course important to create an
environment favourable to language revitalization) more attention should be
paid to the practical side of language learning.

Henry K.