Smithsonian joins U. to log tribal languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Deseret Morning News, Monday, January 17, 2005
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600105377,00.html

Smithsonian joins U. to log tribal languages

By Stephen Speckman
Deseret Morning News

Out of 175 American Indian languages, only about 20 are being taught to
children as generations of Indians die off and leave little or no
evidence of their languages or cultures.

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[Desert Morning News graphic]

"This is probably the hottest topic in linguistics right now," said 
Lyle Campbell, director of the University of Utah's Center for American 
Indian Languages (CAIL). "The languages are becoming extinct at such an 
accelerated rate.

"This is a worldwide problem," Campbell added. "All of the Utah 
(Indian) languages are in trouble."

It's a big enough problem that the Smithsonian Institution in 
Washington, D.C., has decided to partner with the U. center in an 
effort to record and archive Indian languages, stories and cultural 
histories in video, audio and book form.

When languages are lost, Campbell said, "then we're all diminished, 
because we don't have access to their experiences."

One of the U.'s current projects, funded by an ongoing grant, involves 
the preservation of endangered languages in northern Argentina and 
Brazil.

The Smithsonian is lending its support to the U. center with the use of 
linguists and anthropologists.

"They have very similar interests to ours, so it was a natural 
collaboration," Campbell said. "We'll be able to get more people 
involved ? we need more human resources."

Unique collections of endangered languages are kept in the National 
Anthropological Archives, which is housed in the National Museum of 
Natural History.

Within that museum is the Department of Anthropology's senior linguist, 
Ives Goddard, who said the department's staff has made the study of 
Native American languages a priority for over 150 years.

The one-of-a-kind arrangement with the U. will have students traveling 
to Washington to work with Smithsonian collections and staff.

"We realized that we were both thinking along the same lines after the 
appointment of Lyle Campbell to head CAIL last year," Goddard said.

After two meetings in Washington, the two sides drew up a declaration 
of shared interests and goals. The Smithsonian partnership will be 
housed in the same building at Fort Douglas on the U. campus where U. 
professor of linguistics Mauricio J. Mixco has been working on a 
language preservation project, funded by the National Science 
Foundation.

Mixco is part of four teams sifting through 120 audio tapes filled with 
interviews, stories and anecdotes from members of the Shoshone tribe. 
The recordings date back to the 1960s and 1970s, when anthropological 
linguist Wick R. Miller ventured onto reservations with a curiosity and 
a tape recorder. Miller left the tapes behind as part of his estate.

Mixco's project has been in the exploratory phase since its beginning 
last September. The teams will act as audio archaeologists, uncovering 
legends and histories that have not been heard since they were 
recorded, according to Mixco.

"All Shoshone in the Great Basin area will uncover a huge library of 
their history," Mixco said.

The recordings will be digitally preserved and rendered archive-ready, 
which means greater access to those who want to learn more about 
Shoshone Indians and their language. With only about 20 percent of the 
tribe still speaking the language, Mixco estimates that the Shoshone 
dialect could be nonexistent within 20 or 25 years.

"Here's the question around the world: 'Are children learning the 
language?' " Mixco said. "If it's 'No,' then that's the death warrant."

In places like Hawaii and New Zealand, where there are larger 
communities of indigenous speakers, "language nests" have helped revive 
dying languages, Mixco said. The "grandparent generation" in these 
areas was organized into groups that included children, who were taught 
the language once spoken regularly by their elders.

It's estimated that more than 2,000 languages were once spoken 
throughout the Americas, with fewer than 200 remaining in North America 
and 450 in Latin America.

Worldwide, it's expected that 90 percent of all languages will not 
survive this century or that, best case, as many as 50 percent will die 
off, according the U. center.

"Linguists are racing against time to study and understand the 
languages spoken by small groups around the world before they are 
replaced by regional and national languages in the onslaught of 
globalization," Goddard said. "This effort is critical to our ability 
to understand the possibilities of human language in general and will 
be crucial to all future attempts to understand the basic principles 
that underlie all languages, including our own."

E-mail: sspeckman at desnews.com

? 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company