Conferences focus on saving native languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Conferences focus on saving native languages

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 04 June 2004
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/04_chocenyo.shtml

BERKELEY – Chochenyo, the language of the Muwekma Ohlone people, has
been silent since the 1930s, but a handful of tribal members working
with mentors from the University of California, Berkeley's linguistics
department are bringing it back to life.

Today, Chochenyo is being heard once again in conversation and song, and
can be seen in written communications and a guidebook being prepared to
help teach others.

Tribal chair Rosemary Cambra and Monica Arellano, co-chair of the
Muwekma Ohlone Language Committee, will share the Muwekma Ohlone
success story at the "Breath of Life: Silent No More" conference at UC
Berkeley as it opens this Saturday, June 5. The five-day program is for
California Indians determined to revitalize their dormant and
endangered languages.

"I feel very privileged to have been allowed the opportunity to be a
part of the awakening of our native Chochenyo language. It has truly
been a very fulfilling experience," said Arellano, also vice chair of
the Muwekma Ohlone tribe.

[Professor Juliette Blevins, shown wearing a Yurok cap, is working with
members of the Muwekma  Ohlone tribe to revive  their  language,
Chochenyo. (Photo  by J.P. Blevins)]
 
"The Chochenyo experience gives us all great hope," said Juliette
Blevins, a visiting professor and researcher at UC Berkeley's
Department of Linguistics, who has been leading weekly Chochenyo
lessons with Muwekma Ohlone hailing from Richmond to San Jose.

Leanne Hinton, chair of the linguistics department, which is in the
College of Letters & Science, said she is always excited by the Breath
of Life conference, which every year draws more interest. This year's
conference is attracting approximately 60 people from about a dozen
tribes from throughout California - others were turned away as
organizers were unable to accommodate everyone interested.

Beginning Thursday, June 10, over 300 language educators and others will
attend the four-day "Language is Life: the 11th Annual Stabilizing
Indigenous Languages Conference" that also is being held on campus.

The Muwekma Ohlone, the indigenous people of the San Francisco Bay Area,
will be featured guests at both conferences. At the second event, they
will offer a Chochenyo welcome to conference attendees from across the
United States and Canada, and as far away as Taiwan and Australia, who
want to learn more about how to revitalize indigenous languages in
their states and countries.

An important chapter of the Muwekma story got underway in Blevins'
undergraduate course, "Languages of North America." Student Jon Rodney
wanted to translate a Chochenyo song on a recording from the
Smithsonian Institution. To do so, he relied on linguistics
anthropologist J.P. Harrington's field notes, replete with information
about California Indians, including Spanish and English translations of
their languages as spoken around the beginning of the 20th century.
When Rodney finished his paper, he shared it with several Muwekma
Ohlones.

"He got a wonderful response, saying they just started a language
committee and wanted to revive Chochenyo," Blevins said, "And, could he
help?"

"The recordings of Chochenyo contain only songs, many without words,"
she said. "So, when this all started, there was a very hard question to
answer: What does the spoken language actually sound like?"

To help put the puzzle together, Blevins tapped Harrington's notes, his
good ear for language and penchant for phonetic detail, and listened to
all of his Chochenyo recordings. Blevins then listened to all Miwok and
Yokut recordings available at the Berkeley Language Center, because
their sounds and structures are believed to be similar to Chochenyo. To
develop a concrete sense of Harrington's phonetic symbols for Chochenyo
sounds, she compared these with the ones he used for another California
Indian language, Yurok, which she knows well. Like most indigenous
languages, Chochenyo never had its own written system - until last
year, when the Muwekma Ohlone Language Committee adopted the new
Chochenyo alphabet.

Another important resource in the Chochenyo saga is The Bancroft
Library, repository of some of the oldest written records about such
Coastanoan languages as Chochenyo, Mutsun and Rumsien. The library has
original manuscripts from the 1800s, including Father Felipe Arroyo de
la Cuesta's impressive transcriptions of hundreds of Mutsun sentences.

Blevins and Rodney officially launched their language lessons last
spring at a Muwekma Ohlone cultural campout at Del Valle Regional Park
near Pleasanton, sharing a Chochenyo word list and giving simple group
language lessons.

"There was a lot of enthusiasm after that, and the tribe asked if I
would give weekly language lessons," Blevins said. "I agreed, but only
by insisting that we were in this together, that we would all be
learning together."

Those lessons began in July 2003, and are still going strong. Five to
eight dedicated students attend the weekly three-hour evening sessions,
with attendance at quarterly tribal language workshops ranging from 30
to 50.

"I think they've made amazing progress in terms of being able to speak
the language," said Blevins. "Everyone has basic conversation skills,
and some have more. They can talk about their family and home life.
Because of the gaps in vocabulary, what you'll often hear is a
Chochenyo sentence with a few English words mixed in, but with the
appropriate grammatical structure for Chochenyo."

The Chochenyo database being developed by the tribe contains from 1,000
to 2,000 basic words. To fill in vocabulary gaps, the Muwekma Ohlone
Language Committee is creating new words. An example is the new
Chochenyo word for minute, "ikka," formed with their own word for
"dust" and used for a small unit of time.

The next step, Blevins said, is to expand outreach in the Muwekma Ohlone
community, possibly through language classes in area schools and
community centers.

Through the Master Apprentice Program conceived through UC Berkeley's
Linguistics Department and the Advocates for Indigenous California
Language Survival, a California native organization devoted to
revitalizing the state's indigenous languages, about 70 teens have
learned approximately 25 native Californian languages. They've had help
from mentors working with them 10 to 20 hours a week over the past
three years.

Of the 175 indigenous languages in the United States, children are
speaking fewer than 20 of them at home, said Hinton, and the demand for
help to save endangered languages is outpacing the resources.

"Speaking a heritage language isn't just a form of communication," she
said. "It's a deep part of a person's identity and view of the
universe."

There also is an increasing awareness among tribes of the resources
available - like those at UC Berkeley - to help save endangered
languages, said Hinton.

"Interest in language revitalization is something that's growing around
the world," said Hinton, author of "How to Keep Your Language Alive"
(Heyday Books, 2002). "Nationalism and globalization are constant and
growing threats to the existence of indigenous societies, and partly as
a response to that, there is more and more movement by indigenous
people to maintain their identities and not get melted into the big
melting pot."

The Muwekma Ohlone say it this way:

"Mak-muwekma mak-noono ya roote 'innutka, mak-'uyyaki_,
Nuhu, mak pekre ne tuuxi,
'At mak roote 'innutka hu_i_tak."

"Our culture and our language are the way to our past,
>From it we embrace the present,
And follow the road to the future."

###

NOTE: Leanne Hinton can be reached at hinton at socrates.berkeley.edu.
Juliette Blevins can be reached at jblevins at uclink.berkeley.edu. For
more details about the "Breath of Life" conference, visit
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/lingdept/Current/research/bol.html. For
more information about the "Language is Life" event, see
http://www.aicls.org/pages/04SILC.html. The Muwekma Ohlone webpage is
at www.muwekma.org.