DOCUMENTING WASHOE

[Andre Cramblit]

Tribal elders are helping a linguist compile an online dictionary of  
Washo, a language close to extinction. More than just words are at  
stake.
By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2007
WOODFORDS, CALIF. -- In a classroom amid the dusty hills southeast of  
Lake Tahoe, an unlikely duo sit across from each other and conjugate  
the verb "to sleep." They are working in Washo, a language with, at  
best, an uncertain future.

Elshim, to sleep. Lelshimi, I am sleeping. Elshimi, he is sleeping.  
Shelshimi, they are sleeping.

On one side of a yellow plastic table sits Ramona Dick, a 74-year-old  
elder of the Washo tribe, a great-grandmother and retired cook whose  
formal education ended at the eighth grade but who has a deep  
knowledge of the Native American language she learned as a child.

Facing her is Alan Yu, 30, a Hong Kong-born linguist who immigrated  
to California as a teenager, earned a doctorate at UC Berkeley and  
now is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Despite differences in age, culture and education, the two have  
bonded in a way that they hope will bring lasting results.

What brings them together is their mutual interest in Washo, a tongue  
that tribe members estimate is spoken fluently by no more than 20 or  
30 people. The big picture is even grimmer: Half of California's 100  
Native American languages no longer have fluent speakers, and many of  
the rest have just five or six hanging on, experts say.

Attempts to document, if not revive, many of those languages have  
been going on for years. The goal is to preserve more than just  
conversation and literature; a vital part of cultural identity --  
what it means, for example, to be a Washo -- slips away when a  
language becomes extinct.

Now, Yu and Dick are part of newer efforts applying contemporary  
technology worldwide.

Last year, Yu received a $160,000 federal grant to compile an online  
dictionary of 5,000 Washo words and phrases, complete with digitally  
recorded pronunciations by Dick and other Washo elders. Scheduled to  
be finished in 2009, the dictionary is designed partly as a tool to  
help younger Washos learn the language -- even if just a few words,  
such as da'aw (Lake Tahoe), gewe (coyote)and gu'u (maternal  
grandmother).

"It's going to be lost, I think, if nobody tries to teach them," Dick  
said of Washo, which had no written form until 20th century scholars  
began transcribing it phonetically. "If the young people could learn,  
maybe they can tell their children down the line a bit that it's  
important to our tribe. Because we are not a very big tribe."



Washo (some spell it Washoe) leaders estimate that there are about  
1,500 tribal members, mainly in the eastern Sierra on both sides of  
the California-Nevada border. Dick lives in Woodfords, in an isolated  
Washo community known as Hung-a-lel-ti (Southern Washoes) on rolling  
ranchland with stunning mountain vistas. Its 350 or so residents can  
walk to the lime-green education center, where Yu and Dick meet, but  
must drive 10 miles north into Nevada for most shopping.

During his summer and vacation-time visits to the Washo towns, Yu  
said, he tries to avoid the paternalistic attitudes that strained  
some past relationships between nonnative researchers and Native  
Americans. Yu, who spoke only Cantonese until he started elementary  
school, stressed that his goal is to document Washo, not to save it.

"I think the consensus these days is for a language to be  
revitalized," he said. "It's really a community effort. It's  
something that an outsider can't come in and force it onto people."

The Washos have a better chance at revitalization than many other  
tribes, scholars say. About 60 adults and teens attend several Washo  
language classes, and teachers introduce Washo words and phrases to  
young children in pre-kindergarten and after-school programs.  
Besides, Yu said, it is a "gift" to meet fluent -- and vibrant --  
volunteers for the dictionary project like Dick, her cousin Steven  
James and his cousin Eleanore Smokey.

Nevertheless, everyone agrees it will be an uphill effort against  
assimilation and English-language television. Another formidable  
obstacle: the educations of many middle-aged and elderly tribe  
members, who were sent away from Washo-speaking homes to government  
boarding schools that discouraged the use of Washo.

Dick learned the language from a grandmother and great-grandmother,  
neither of whom had a full grasp of English. A widow, Dick says that  
none of her own five children, 18 grandchildren and seven great- 
grandchildren really speak Washo, although some are trying to learn  
and most understand when she speaks at home or at a class she is  
leading.

Lynda Shoshone, the tribe's language and cultural preservation  
coordinator, said she could "kick myself in the rear for not paying  
more attention" as a child when her grandmother spoke Washo. Shoshone  
said she knows Washo words but has trouble putting sentences  
together. However, her 22-year-old son, she said, attended a now- 
defunct immersion school and is quite fluent. So, she said, the  
language has a shot at survival.

James, 74, is pessimistic. "There's too much competition from the  
present-day world," said the retired electrical construction worker  
from Dresslerville, Nev. "Everyday living, your job, just trying to  
survive in this world is difficult."

Still, he and Dick are willing to spend long days, sometimes from 10  
a.m. to 6 p.m., answering Yu's detailed lists of questions. The  
elders' responses about nouns, adjectives, verbs and sentences are  
captured on a digital recording device, and Yu's graduate students  
splice them and upload them online.

On a recent day, Dick visited the classroom leaning on the cane she  
now requires and sat in front of the microphone. A full-faced,  
vivacious woman with a graying ponytail and gold hoop earrings, she  
paused only when she was unable to pull a word from the memory of her  
late grandmother's kitchen or when her voice got "froggy" from  
overuse. After all, "Dr. Yu," as she calls him despite his pleas for  
informality, "comes from far away, and when he does, it's always nice  
to sit down and talk with him."

Wearing jeans, a pullover shirt, sneakers and squarish glasses, Yu  
queried her in a low-key and respectful manner, like a grandson  
fishing for a family story. But he also was persistent and, for  
accuracy, asked the same thing in various ways. Taking lots of  
handwritten notes, he wanted equivalents of English words and  
inquired about Washo words or sentences he had picked up from other  
sources.

"Do you know how to describe someone who has a big tummy?" Yu asked.  
"Have you ever heard people talk about Ngalbuli?"

"It means he's got, like, a pot belly," Dick responded, chuckling.

They tackled other verbs after "sleep." How would you say, "I'm  
laughing?" Yu asked. Lasawi.

How about a lot of people laughing? Sasawi. Can you say that one more  
time? Sasawi. To swim? Yeem. I'm swimming? Diyeemi. He's swimming?  
Yeemi.

Sometimes Dick gently corrected Yu's backward word order or mangled  
pronunciations. Sometimes Yu pushed her into shades of meaning, such  
as the difference between shooting something and trying to shoot it.

Then came nouns: paternal grandmother (ama), maternal grandfather  
(elel), maternal grandchildren (gu'yi).

What about shrimp? She shook her head, drawing a blank. The word for  
fish is atabi, but apparently there is no word for shrimp. "There was  
no shrimp around here," she later explained, "until white men brought  
them into markets."

Yu has posted a preliminary Washo pronunciation guide online at  
http://washo.uchicago.edu and has compiled about two-thirds of the  
words he needs before he makes the dictionary and its voicing  
technology available to the public late next year. That progress is  
"very impressive," said Douglas Whalen, a program officer at the  
National Science Foundation's program known as Documenting Endangered  
Languages. The program, which also involves the National Endowment  
for the Humanities, is funding Yu's dictionary and similar work in  
about 60 other languages worldwide.

"Language is part of our human heritage," Whalen said. "It's part of  
what makes us human. Not having any record of what's gone on in a  
language is regrettable."



The rate of world language extinction is alarming, a study sponsored  
by the National Geographic Society warned this week. Of the world's  
7,000 languages, two are disappearing every month, and half may be  
gone by century's end, including scores of Native American tongues in  
the Southwestern U.S., researchers said.

To an English speaker, Washo sounds difficult, with frequent glottal  
stops that change meanings and a throaty "ng" sound (ngawngang is  
child). Verbs change prefixes as they shift among "I, he, we, they,"  
and verbs also have several forms for the recent or distant past. Its  
oddities include some double-negative expressions, such as "I don't  
not know."

Washo is very unlike the other Native American languages -- Miwok,  
Maidu and Northern Paiute -- that surround it, according to William  
H. Jacobsen Jr., a professor emeritus at the University of Nevada,  
Reno, who conducted groundbreaking linguistic research on Washo  
starting in the 1950s and published a basic grammar guide in 1996.

The tribe's linguistic isolation fed into a sense of cultural  
distinctiveness in the Indian world, even as white settlers took over  
traditional Washo fishing and hunting territory for silver mining,  
ranching, lake resorts and casinos in the 19th and 20th centuries,  
Jacobsen said.

Jacobsen said he too is compiling a Washo dictionary, albeit a print  
one. But he is gloomy about Washo's future, although he said he hopes  
his work, language classes and Yu's dictionary will help young people  
learn a few words and phrases.

"Even though they don't know the language or the grammar, there is  
some value in this," he said. "It gives them some identity and they  
can say, 'I'm a Washo.' "

Internet dictionaries are the latest tools for language survival but  
are not the sole answer, said former UC Berkeley linguistics  
professor Leanne Hinton. Tribes showing some success have put special  
effort into classes for children and for adults, such as the  
Pechangas, who are working to revive Luiseño in communities near  
Temecula, and the Yuroks in northwestern California, said Hinton, an  
expert in tribal languages.

Those and other tribes have people "who don't want to go down without  
a fight, so to speak," said Hinton, who has helped organize the  
biennial "Breath of Life -- Silent No More" conferences at UC  
Berkeley that seek to revive endangered Native American languages in  
California.

Yu, one of Hinton's former students, became fascinated with Washo  
when he was assigned to help out at one of the conferences. Hinton  
described Yu as a good match for the Washo elders: "He is extremely  
competent as well as being good with people. He is a very patient  
person."

Besides Cantonese and English, Yu can speak Mandarin and has a  
rudimentary knowledge of Turkish and Russian. He has a grasp of some  
Washo vocabulary and grammar but is not fluent.

"I am picking it up slowly. In general, I'm not a very good language  
learner. That may seem odd for a linguist to say, but linguists are  
not necessarily polyglots," said Yu, whose new book on linguistics  
was recently published by Oxford University Press.

Last month, the Chicago professor went public with his own Washo  
abilities. The tribe held a luncheon for anyone involved in learning  
the language. Yu prepared a brief speech in Washo but was clearly  
nervous.

So he first ran the speech past Dick: I'm happy to be here today.  
Wading ebe dihamu' angawi wa' le'iga' a'alu. . .

As I do not speak Washo very well. Washiw diwagay'angaweesinga. . .

Eat well and drink well. Gemlu'angaw geme'angaw.

Dick gently brushed up Yu's pronunciations here and there and sought  
to calm his concerns about the lunch crowd's reaction: "They can't  
expect to hear you talking like a lawyer."

That afternoon, about 20 people attended the baked chicken and salad  
luncheon in the education center. Melba Rakow, who teaches Washo  
classes in Nevada, offered a blessing and urged the tribe, she later  
translated, "not to throw our language down."

Yu initially hung back a bit before screwing up his courage. Then,  
clutching his notes, he seemed to carry off the speech flawlessly,  
finishing up with "Di'nga ledinga" ("That's all I'll say.") The  
audience applauded, and Dick declared: "I think he did real well."

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