Saving Aleut (fwd)

[Phil Cash Cash]

Saving Aleut:
Linguist begins effort to preserve native Alaskan language
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/uow-sal062403.php

It's getting harder and harder for the few remaining residents of the
Aleutian and Pribilof islands who speak Aleut to hold a conversation in
the native Alaskan language.

The number of Alaskans who speak Aleut has fallen to around 100 from 620
just two decades ago. That's a far cry from the estimated 20,000 people
who once spoke Aleut in the Aleutians and Pribilofs, which jut out
hundreds of miles into the North Pacific Ocean off the Alaska
Peninsula.

Aleut is one of 3,000 to 3,500 languages in danger of vanishing before
the end of the 21st century. However, a University of Washington
linguist and the Aleuts will begin a two-year effort to preserve the
language later this year by recording everyday conversations on audio
and videotapes, then transcribing and translating the conversations.
Aleut, or Unangam Tunuu, is part of the Eskimo-Aleut family of
languages.

Alice Taff, a research associate in the UW's linguistics department and
a former schoolteacher in the Pribilof Islands, will return to Alaska
next month to begin work on the project, which is being funded with a
$151,000 grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at
the University of London. She will be working with tribal communities
in five villages – Unalaska, Nikolski and Atka in the Aleutians and
St. George and St. Paul in the Pribilofs.

"Most fluent Aleut speakers today are 55 and older, although there are
some who are 30-plus," said Taff. "There is usually a generation of
people we call 'understanders' who comprehend the language but do not
speak it. Understanders are an international phenomenon and perhaps 320
people fit this category among the Aleuts."

Aleut began declining after the United States purchased Alaska from
Russia in 1867. Government policy and the schools, which for many years
didn't teach Aleut and only used English, were major contributors to
this decline. Other factors were economic pressures and what the people
themselves considered to be unfashionable.

"For a while speaking Aleut wasn't cool," said Taff, who emphasized that
the effort to save the language comes from the Aleuts themselves. She
and a number of tribal members are part of the Aleutian/Pribilof
Islands Association Task Force for Language Revitalization.

She said endangered languages typically "go underground" and are held or
maintained by elders. As a community shifts to a new language, features
of the ancestral language may appear in the new language. In this case
of Aleut features crop up in the local English. When a language is not
being passed on to the children it becomes endangered.

Aleut is both a written and oral language. A Russian priest compiled the
first Aleut dictionary when Russia occupied the islands. An alphabet
based on English letters was developed for Aleut in the 1970s and has
been used in teaching Aleut as a second language. Taff will relocate
from Seattle to Juneau in early August and will begin fieldwork
recording the language later in the year. During the following two
years she will record in each of the five villages twice each year,
once in the summer and once in the winter.

"We want to record seasonally because different activities occur in the
summer and winter," said Taff. "We are interested in recording things
that are important in the language. For example, there are many words
for the sea and water activities because the Aleuts are a marine
people.

"We want to record indoors and outdoors so that the material will be
rich. It will include people engaging in hunting and fishing, preparing
dinner, eating meals, working in canneries in Unalaska and playing
cards, whatever the community deems appropriate."

Taff will first hold meetings in each community to explain the project
and get direction from each village on how she should go about
recording the most natural language, and which settings are the most
valuable and which are inappropriate to record. She plans to hire a
language assistant in each village to help record conversations and to
transcribe and translate them.

The end product will be 100 hours of conversation, along with the
transcription and translation in Aleut, that will be transferred to
compact disks or DVDs.

Taff believes that there are many compelling reasons to preserve
endangered languages such as Aleut.

"The most important to me is that it is a civil rights issue. The people
want to save their language and that is their right. In many instances
languages have been wrested from people by colonial domination. This is
the case with Aleut."

In addition, she said there are academic reasons (documenting the gamut
of human languages), community identity issues (people identify
themselves by the language they speak) and economic benefits (just as
there were economic reasons for language suppression, the economy would
benefit from having more multi-lingual people because they will be more
productive).

"All languages are equally valuable and they allow us to see the range
of human expression," said Taff. "Language strengthens the bonds
between generations. It is really difficult on a community when
grandchildren can't speak fluently with their grandparents."