Saving Languages

[Andre Cramblit]

The Daily Californian
Meet the Prof
A Linguist’s Quest to Save a Dying Language
BY Andrea Lu
Contribution Writer
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Click to Enlarge
photo/eli weissman
Andrew Garrett studies the Yurok language of one Native American  
group. He hopes to help in preserving the rich language and its culture.

There are currently 6,000 languages around the world. Fast forward  
100 years, and there will only be 600 left-the rest will have  
disappeared and become dead languages.

UC Berkeley linguistics professor Andrew Garrett is documenting the  
Native American Yurok language in hopes of chronicling their language  
for the future before it too vanishes, as there are only a half dozen  
elderly Yurok speakers remaining.

"My purpose is to fill out our knowledge of that language, and it  
involves a lot of different things-recording different kinds of  
speech, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and trying to integrate  
that information with material that earlier linguists have  
collected," Garrett said.

Garrett, a historical linguist who studies how languages evolve over  
time, turned his focus from Europe and the Middle East to study  
Californian Native languages in 2000. Since then, he has been working  
primarily on understanding and analyzing the Yurok language.

The Yurok is the largest Native American tribe in California with  
currently 5,000 enrolled tribal members. Also known as the Klamath  
River Indians, the tribe resides north of the city Eureka.

Garrett's interest in the Yurok language began "by chance, really"  
when he moved to California and agreed to work with a colleague who  
wanted to research it.

"For me personally, it turned out to be a fortunate chance because  
for one thing the structure of that particular language is a little  
unusual among languages of California and Native American languages  
in general," he said. "While I was working on Yurok language I found  
aspects that cast interesting light on problems of Indo-European  
languages and vice versa."

It was also the first language that Berkeley anthropology department  
founder Alfred Kroeber researched intensively starting from 1901.  
Kroeber left behind an archive stuffed with field notes and  
recordings on different aspects of the Yurok culture such as myths,  
ceremonies and narratives, yet most of the material was never published.

"What I find interesting about it is the richness of the archive and  
the challenge of figuring out how the language as it was documented  
in 1905 is similar to or different from the language we can hear  
now," Garrett said. "The project is trying to pull all of that into  
one big picture of a single language."

The database has allowed him to gain valuable insight into a language  
that now only few people can speak. One of his goals is to map the  
differences in people's speech by location to find patterns.

"My work on the historical side really has focused on working with  
the archival material on Yurok," Garrett said. "One of the projects  
I've been doing lately is going through the archives because right  
now there are very few speakers, but in the old days there were  
thousands of speakers and apparently a lot of diversity in areas  
where the language was spoken."

Garrett's ultimate goal is to establish in the linguistic archives  
the documentary material on Yurok that will be available to scholars  
and native people. Garrett also hopes to produce a comprehensive  
grammar reference, as well as a book featuring stories, myths and  
narratives in Yurok.

His experience working with the Yurok has been enjoyable, says  
Garrett, and community members have been receptive to his research.

However, working with the Yurok has not been completely stress free  
as the reality of the extremely small minority who can speak Yurok  
and their old age has been a depressing reminder for Garrett.

"It is frustrating to work with a language where all the speakers are  
very elderly," Garrett said. "During the time I have been working on  
the language one very good speaker has died, and another came close  
to death but now is fine...it can be discouraging and a little scary.  
Also on a practical level, they're all sort of deaf so that's been an  
obstacle."

The Yurok case represents the growing threat of languages around the  
world dying off at an incredibly rapid rate.

"The field has collectively recognized in the last 10, 20 years what  
has been true for a long time but came into everyone's consciousness  
recently-that a huge amount of languages in the world are going to be  
dead in 50 to 100 years," Garrett said.

According to Garrett, the cause of the language extinction resides  
primarily on social factors such as colonialism, imperialism,  
economic greed and oppression of native peoples. Also, the  
globalization of certain languages such as English and Spanish have  
contributed to the demise of many indigenous languages.

"The root of the problem is really social because what society is  
doing to small communities and small groups of people has an effect  
on those people and thus has an effect on their languages," Garrett  
said.

One of the causes that has produced a direct negative effect on  
indigenous languages in the United States is President George Bush's  
No Child Left Behind Act that has caused schools to adjust their  
curriculum to the English-based test.

"The result of the intense orientation toward those English tests is  
that some schools that have or are near Native American communities  
are tending to drop native language programs because they feel they  
don't have the time or resources," Garrett said.

While some linguists feel that they should actively revitalize  
threatened languages within respective communities, Garrett feels  
that the role of the linguists should be of a careful promoter, and  
should not intervene at will.

"Personally, I don't see it as the white linguist's role to be an  
activist inside in the tribe," he said. "If (the tribes) want to use  
the language more, then we try to help them. For example, last year  
when I was on sabbatical I did a lot of workshops for the Yurok  
language program on the grammatical aspects of the language. But I  
don't think it would be appropriate for us to push it ourselves."

A common misconception of linguists is that they can speak many  
different languages. Garrett's response to this stereotype is that  
linguists study languages, not speak them, and he himself is still  
far from becoming fluent in Yurok.

"I'm at that foreign language learning stage where, when someone's  
talking, you recognize as it goes along that you know each of the  
pieces but they're going too fast for you to put it all together and  
you want to say 'No, no, stop, wait! Talk four times as slow!'"  
Garrett said.
Contact Andrea Lu at science at dailycal.org.