Saving Languages

[Andre Cramblit]

The Impassioned Fight to Save Dying Languages
More and more voices are speaking up to keep them from being  
overwhelmed by English and global pressures.
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Times Science Writer

LOSING CALIFORNIA'S LANGUAGES Of 100 Native American languages once  
spoken in California, 50 have been wiped out completely. An  
additional 17 have no fluent speakers. The remainder are spoken by  
only a few people. An enlarged version of the map below shows the  
surviving languages, the areas in which they are spoken and the  
number of native speakers.

HILO, HAWAII--It was not the teachers bearing baskets of feather  
leis, the fanfares played on conch shells or the beating of the  
sacred sharkskin drum that made Hulilauakea Wilson's high school  
graduation so memorable.

It was this: For the first time in a century, a child of the islands  
had been educated exclusively in his native Hawaiian language,  
immersed from birth in a special way of speaking his mind like a  
tropical fish steeped in the salt waters of its nativity.

It was a language being reborn.

More than an academic rite of passage, the graduation last May of  
Wilson and four other students at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School on  
the Big Island of Hawaii signaled a coming of age for one of the  
world's most ambitious efforts to bring an endangered language back  
from the brink of extinction.

The world has become a hospice for dying languages, which are  
succumbing to the pressure of global commerce, telecommunications,  
tourism, and the inescapable influence of English. By the most  
reliable estimates, more than half of the world's 6,500 languages may  
be extinct by the end of this century.

"The number of languages is plummeting, imploding downward in an  
altogether unprecedented rate, just as human population is shooting  
straight upward," said University of Alaska linguist Michael Krauss.

But scattered across the globe, many ethnic groups are struggling to  
find their own voice, even at the risk of making their dealings with  
the broader world they inhabit more fractious.

 From the Hoklo and Hakka in Hong Kong to the Euskara in Spain's  
Basque country, thousands of minority languages are clinging  
precariously to existence. A few, like Hebrew and Gaelic, have been  
rejuvenated as part of resurgent nationalism. Indeed, so important is  
language to political and personal self-determination that a people's  
right to speak its mind in the language of its choice is becoming an  
international human right.

California once had the densest concentration of indigenous languages  
in North America. Today, almost every one of its 50 or so surviving  
native languages is on its deathbed. Indeed, the last fluent speaker  
of Chumash, a family of six languages once heard throughout Southern  
California and the West, is a professional linguist at UC Santa Barbara.

More people in California speak Mongolian at home than speak any of  
the state's most endangered indigenous languages.

"Not one of them is spoken by children at home," said UC Berkeley  
linguist Leanne Hinton.

None of this happened by accident.

All Native American languages, as well as Hawaiian, were for a  
century the target of government policies designed to eradicate them  
in public and in private, to ensure that they were not passed from  
parent to child.

Until 1987, it was illegal to teach Hawaiian in the islands' public  
schools except as a foreign language. The language that once claimed  
the highest literacy rate in the world was banned even from the  
islands' private schools.

Indeed, there may be no more powerful testimony to the visceral  
importance of language than the government's systematic efforts to  
destroy all the indigenous languages in the United States and replace  
them with English.

No language in memory, except Spanish, has sought so forcefully to  
colonize the mind. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the  
territorial United States when Columbus made landfall in 1492, only  
175 are still spoken. Of those, only 20 are being passed on to children.

In 1868, a federal commission on Indian affairs concluded: "In the  
difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. . . .  
Their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English  
language substituted." The commission reasoned that "through sameness  
of language is produced sameness of sentiment, and thought. . . . In  
process of time the differences producing trouble would have been  
gradually obliterated."

Not until 1990 did the federal government reverse its official  
hostility to indigenous languages, when the Native American Languages  
Act made it a policy to preserve native tongues.

Policies against indigineous languages were once in effect in many  
developed nations. Only the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991  
ended that government's efforts to force its ethnic minorities to  
adopt Russian. Policies in other nations aimed at eliminating  
minority languages such as Catalan in Spain, Kurdish in Turkey,  
Inuktitut in Canada and Lardio in Australia, to name just a few.

Silencing a language does much more than eliminate a source of  
"differences producing trouble."

A language embodies a community of people and their way of being. It  
is a unique mental framework that gives special form to universal  
human experiences. Languages are the most complex products of the  
human mind, each differing enormously in its sounds, structure and  
pattern of thought, said UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond.

As a prism through which perceptions are reflected, there is almost  
no end to the variations.

In some languages, gender plays a relatively minor role, allowing  
sexually neutral forms of personal pronouns, and in others it is so  
overriding that men and women must use completely different forms of  
speech. Other tongues infuse every phrase with the structure of  
ownership, while others make cooperation a key grammatical rule. Some  
see only a category where another sees the individuals that  
constitute it.

There are languages in which verities of time, cardinal directions,  
even left and right--as English conceives them--are almost wholly  
absent.

"If we ever want to understand how the human mind works, we really  
want to know all the kinds of ways that have evolved for making sense  
out of the kaleidoscope of experience," said linguist Marianne Mithun  
at UC Santa Barbara.

Suffocating in Silence


More than an ocean separates Katherine Silva Saubel on the Morongo  
Reservation at the foot of the arid, wind-swept San Gorgonio Pass  
near Banning from the language renaissance underway in Hawaii.

The silence suffocating many languages is almost tangible in her  
darkened, cinder-block living room. There, in a worn beige recliner  
flanked by a fax machine, a treadmill and a personal computer,  
Saubel, a 79-year-old Cahuilla Indian activist and scholar, marshals  
her resistance to time and the inroads of English.

Saubel is the last fluent speaker of her native tongue on this  
reservation.

"Since my husband died," she said, "there is no one here I can  
converse with."

For 50 years, this broad-shouldered great-grandmother has worked  
almost single-handedly to ensure the survival of Cahuilla.

Her efforts earned her a place in the National Women's Hall of Fame  
and a certificate of merit from the state Indian Museum in  
Sacramento. Even so, her language is slipping away.

"I wanted to teach the children the language, but their mothers  
wanted them to know English. A lot of them want the language taught  
to them now," Saubel said. "Maybe it will revive."

If it does, it will be a recovery based almost solely on the memories  
she has pronounced and defined for academic tape recorders, the words  
she has filed in the only known dictionary of Cahuilla, and the songs  
she has helped commit to living tribal memory. Tribal artifacts and  
memorabilia are housed in the nearby Makli Museum that she founded,  
the first in North America to be organized and managed by Native  
Americans.

Born on the Los Coyotes Reservation east of Warm Springs, Saubel did  
not even see a white person until she was 4 years old--"I thought he  
was sick," she recalled--and English had no place in her world until  
she was 7.

Then her mother--who spoke neither English nor Spanish--sent her to a  
public school.

She was, she recalled, the only Indian girl in the classroom. She  
could not speak English. No one tried to teach her to speak the  
language, she said. Mostly, she was ignored.

"I would speak to them in the Indian language and they would answer  
me in English. I don't remember when I began to understand what was  
being said to me," Saubel said. "Maybe a year."

Even so, by eighth grade she had discovered a love of learning that  
led her to become the first Indian woman to graduate from Palm  
Springs High School. But she also saw the other Indian children taken  
aside at recess and whipped if they spoke their language in school.

In time, the child of an Indian medicine woman became an ethno-botanist.

For linguists as far away as Germany and Japan, she became both a  
research subject and a collaborator. She is working now with UC San  
Diego researchers to catalog all the medicinal plants identified in  
tribal lore.

"My race is dying," she said. "I am saving the remnants of my culture  
in these books."

"I am just a voice in the wilderness all by myself," Saubel said.  
"But I have made these books as something for my great-grandchildren.  
And I have great-grandchildren."

In its broadest outlines, her life is a refrain repeated on many  
mainland reservations.

"Basically, every American Indian language is endangered," said  
Douglas Whalen at Yale University's Haskins Laboratory, who is  
chairman of the Endangered Languages Fund.

As a matter of policy, Native American families often were broken up  
to keep children from learning to speak like their parents. Indian  
boarding schools, founded in the last century to implement that  
policy, left generations of Indians with no direct connection to  
their language or tribal cultures.

Today, the federal Administration for Native Americans dispenses  
about $2 million in language grants to tribes every year.

But even the best efforts to preserve the skeletons of grammar,  
vocabulary and syntax cannot breathe life into a language that its  
people have abandoned.

Still, from the Kuruk of Northern California to the Chitimacha of  
Louisiana and the Abenaki of Vermont, dozens of tribes are trying to  
rekindle their languages.

Mohawk is taught in upstate New York, Lakota on the Oglala Sioux  
reservation in South Dakota, Ute in Utah, Choctaw in Mississippi, and  
Kickapoo in Oklahoma. The Navajo Nation--with 80,000 native speakers-- 
has its own comprehensive, college-level training to produce Navajo- 
speaking teachers for the 240 schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and  
Utah that have large numbers of Navajo students.

Some tribes, acknowledging that too few tribal members still speak  
their language, have switched to English for official business while  
trying to give children a feel for the words and catch-phrases of  
their native language.

Even when instruction falls short of achieving fluency, it can  
inspire pride that, in turn, translates into lower school dropout  
rates and improved test scores, several experts said.

Like the Hawaiian students, Mohawk children near Montreal, who are  
taught in their native language, do better academically than their  
tribal schoolmates taught in English.

But revitalization efforts often founder on the political geography  
of the reservation system, economic pressure and the language gap  
that divides grandparent from grandchild.

As many tribes assert the prerogatives of sovereignty for the first  
time in generations, some tribal leaders are jarred to discover  
themselves more at ease in English than in the language of their  
ancestors.

"Often people who are now in power in Indian communities are the  
first generation that does not speak the language, and it can be  
very, very hard for them," Mithun at UC Santa Barbara said. "It is  
hard to be an Indian and not being able to prove it with language.  
You have to be a big person to say I want my kids to be more Indian  
than I am."

When people do break through to fluency, they tap a hidden wellspring  
of community.

"I was in my own language, not just saying the words, but my own  
thoughts," said Nancy Steele of Crescent City, an advanced apprentice  
in the Karuk language.

"It is a way of being, something that has been here for a long, long  
time, a sense of balance with the world."

An All-Out Effort to Save Hawaiian


The effort to revive Hawaiian today is a cultural battle for hearts  
and minds waged with dictionaries, Internet sites, children's books,  
videos, multimedia databases and radio broadcasts. At its forefront  
are a handful of parents and educators determined to remake Hawaiian  
into a language in which every aspect of modern life--from rocket  
science to rap--can be expressed.

Spearheading the revival is a nonprofit foundation called the Aha  
Punano Leo, which means the "language nest" in Hawaiian.

Inspired by the Maori of New Zealand and the Mohawks of Canada,  
Punano Leo teachers use the immersion approach, in which only the  
language being learned is used throughout the school day.

In 15 years, the Punano Leo has grown from a few volunteers running a  
preschool with 12 students to a $5-million-a-year enterprise with 130  
employees that encompasses 11 private Hawaiian language schools, the  
world's most sophisticated native language computer network, and  
millions in university scholarships.

It works in partnership with the state department of education, which  
now operates 16 public Hawaiian language schools, and the University  
of Hawaii, which recently established the first Hawaiian language  
college in Hilo.

So far, it is succeeding most in the place where so many other  
revitalization efforts have failed: in the homes that, all too often,  
are the first place a language begins to die.

To enroll their children in a Punano Leo immersion school, parents  
must pledge to also become fluent in Hawaiian and promise that only  
Hawaiian will be spoken at home.

The effort arose from the frustration of seven Hawaiian language  
teachers, amid a general political reawakening of Hawaiian native  
rights, and one couple's promise to an unborn child.

The couple was University of Hawaii linguist William H. Wilson and  
Hawaiian language expert Kauanoe Kamana, who today is president of  
Punano Leo and principal of the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School.

The child was their son: 1999 graduating senior Hulilauakea Wilson.  
Their daughter Keli'i will graduate next year.

"When we married, my wife and I decided we wanted to use Hawaiian  
when our children were born because no one was speaking it," William  
Wilson said.

"It was a personal thing for us. We were building the schools for us,  
almost, as well as for other people. We started with a preschool and  
now they are in college."

They planted the seed of a language revival and cultivated it.

Like many others, Wilson and Kamana were frustrated that Hawaiian  
could be taught only as a foreign language, even though it was, along  
with English, the official language of a state in which the  
linguistic landscape had been redrawn repeatedly by annexation,  
immigration and tourism.

It must compete with more than 16 languages today to retain a  
foothold in the island state, from Japanese and Spanish to Tagalog  
and Portuguese. Hawaiian ranks only eighth in its homeland, census  
figures show, trailing Samoan in the number of households where it  
can be heard.

It was not always so.

Although Hawaiian did not even acquire an alphabet until the early  
1800s, the islanders' appetite for their language proved so  
insatiable that missionary presses produced about 150 million pages  
of Hawaiian text between 1820 and 1850. At least 150 Hawaiian- 
language newspapers also thrived.

In 1880, there were 150 schools teaching in Hawaiian. A decade later-- 
after the islands were forcibly annexed by the U.S.--there were none.

As part of a small group of committed language teachers, inspired by  
influential University of Hawaii linguist Larry Kimura, Wilson and  
and Kamana vowed to restore the language to a central place among  
Hawaiians.

"This is the most exciting thing I can do for my people," Kamana said  
of the foundation's mission. "This is the core of Hawaiian identity:  
the Hawaiian way. The Hawaiian language is the code of that way."

Updating Old Language With New Vocabulary


Many reviving languages, however, face the new world of the 21st  
century with a 19th century vocabulary.

"A living language means you have to be able to talk about  
everything," said Kamana. "If you can't talk about everything, you  
will talk in English. It is simple."

The task of updating Hawaiian falls to a group called the Lexicon  
Committee.

Once a year, the committee issues a bright yellow dictionary called  
the Mamaka Kaiao, which defines new words created to fill gaps in  
Hawaiian's knowledge of the contemporary world, from a noun for the  
space shuttle's manned maneuvering unit--ahikao ha awe--to a term for  
coherent laser light: malamalama aukahi.

This year's edition runs to 311 pages, with 4,000 terms. A is for  
aeolele: pogo stick; Z is for Zimababue: a citizen of Zimbabwe.

Whenever possible, the new words relate to traditional vocabulary and  
customs. The Hawaiian word for rap music--Paleoleo--refers to warring  
factions who would trade taunts. The word for e-mail--Lika uila-- 
merges words for lightning and letter. The word for pager-- Kele' O-- 
echoes the idea of calling someone's name.

Like so many other aspects of the Hawaiian language revival--from  
translating the state educational curriculum to organizing an  
accredited school system--the committee has the authority to shape  
the future of Hawaiian only because its linguists, native speakers  
and volunteers simply started doing it.

"It exists; that is its authority," said Wilson.

But many of those whose languages are undergoing such resuscitation  
efforts don't want to accommodate the present.

They worry that grafting new verbs and nouns will violate the  
sanctity of the ancient language they hope will draw them back into a  
world of their own.

At Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, where the Keresan language is  
spoken, the tribal council decided in 1997 that it would not develop  
a written form of the language. The language itself was a sacred text  
too closely tied to the pueblo's religion and traditional societies  
to be changed in any way.

Under the onslaught of new technology and new customs, however, even  
the most well-established languages are pushed off balance by the  
natural evolution of words and grammar.

Certainly, the 40 intellectuals of the Academie Francaise in Paris  
and the Office de la Langue Francaise in Quebec are fiercely  
resisting the inroads of Franglais, as a matter of national pride and  
linguistic purity.

But a thousand leaks spring from the linguistic dikes they maintain  
with such determination, if not from the engineering patter of the  
Internet, then from the international slang of sports.

Recently, the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris started  
publishing its three most important scientific journals in English.  
Earlier this year, the Quebec French office felt obliged to post an  
officially approved dictionary of French substitutes for English golf  
terms.

In the same way, many indigenous tribes feel that their native  
tongues must be made to encompass every aspect of a world that  
continued to change long after the language itself stagnated.

The vocabulary of Karuk stopped growing naturally more than half a  
century ago, said Nancy Steele. Even the words for auto parts stopped  
with the models of the 1930s.

As her tribe coins words today, they reflect the spirit of their  
language. The new Karuk word for wristwatch, for example, translates  
as "little sun worn on the wrist."

"If you do not allow a language to be spoken as a living language,"  
Steele said, "it will, in a sense, be a dead language. You have to  
allow it to be alive and animated."

Schools Funded by Donations, Grants


In eighth-grade science class, Hui Hui Mossman's students are  
conducting germination experiments.

Down the hall, Kaleihoku Kala'i's math class wrestles with the  
arithmetic of medians and averages. In social studies class, Lehua  
Veincent taps the floor with a yardstick for emphasis as his students  
recite their family genealogies.

And Caroline Fallau is teaching her 13 11th-graders English--as a  
foreign language.

So the school day hits its stride at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u  
immersion high school, where 84 teenagers, with only an occasional  
adolescent yawn, are hitting the books.

But for the sound of Hawaiian in the hallways, computer workstations  
and classrooms, this could be any well-funded private school in America.

The appearance of prosperity is deceptive.

The Punano Leo schools are sustained year to year by a fragile  
patchwork of donations, state education aid and federal grants. The  
lush, well-manicured campus, with its complex of immaculate blue  
classroom buildings, itself is the work of parent volunteers, aided  
by an island flora in which even the weeds are as ornamental as orchids.

Several miles away, the younger children are arriving at the public  
Keukaha Elementary School, which offers both English and Hawaiian  
immersion classes under one roof.

Those in English classes walk directly to their homerooms, while the  
Hawaiian immersion students--almost half the school--gather in nine  
rows on the school steps for a morning ceremony. Chanting in their  
native language, they formally seek permission to enter and affirm  
their commitment to their community.

They will not encounter English as a subject until fifth grade, where  
it will be taught one hour a day.

Running an elementary school with two languages "is a delicate  
balance and not always an easy one," said Principal Katharine  
Webster. There is competition for resources and the demand for  
immersion classes increases every year, while--in a depressed island  
economy--the education budget does not, she said.

"Teaching in an immersion environment is not easy at all," said third- 
grade teacher Leimaile Bontag.

"You spend weekends and hours after school to prepare lessons. We  
often need to translate on our own, find the new vocabulary. It takes  
hours and hours."

But it is a proud complaint.

Clearly, the teachers are sustained by their love for Hawaiian and  
the community it has fostered. And it appears to be having a  
beneficial effect on the native Hawaiian students, who traditionally  
test at the bottom of the educational system and have the highest  
dropout rate.

Given the difficulty in comparing the language groups, an objective  
yardstick of student performance is hard to come by.

But one set of Stanford Achievement Tests taken by sixth-graders at  
Keukaha Elementary educated since preschool in Hawaiian suggests that  
they are doing as well or better than their schoolmates.

In tests given in English, all of the Hawaiian-educated students  
scored average or above in math while only two-thirds of the students  
in all-English classes scored as well. In reading, two-thirds of  
Hawaiian-educated students scored average or above, compared to half  
of the English-educated students.

Getting an Early Start on Hawaiian


In the shade of the African tulip trees, Kaipua'ala Crabbe is leading  
22 toddlers in song: a lilting Hawaiian translation of "Twinkle,  
Twinkle, Little Star."

Four other teachers and two university students help the children  
pronounce the Hawaiian lyrics at the Punano Leo immersion preschool  
in Hilo.

Hulilauakea Wilson, who volunteers regularly at the preschool when he  
is not attending university classes, helps a little boy tie his  
shoes. The child climbs onto his lap and listens attentively, not yet  
sure of the meaning of every word he hears in school.

"Every child reacts differently," said Alohalani Housman, who has  
been teaching Hawaiian immersion classes for 13 years. "The students  
might listen for months and not say anything. But all of them soon  
become speakers."

And so the seeds of a language revival are cultivated.

"It is the language of this land," young Wilson said. "It is like  
growing the native plants. This is their land. We are the plants of  
this land too."

The success of the Hawaiian program raises a larger question of  
longevity: How well can such diverse languages coexist and how much  
should the majority culture do to accommodate them?

Foundation officials and parents said their embrace of Hawaiian is no  
rejection of English. They are only insisting on their right to be  
bilingual, determined to ensure that Hawaiian is their first language  
of the heart.

"Everybody is so concerned about whether they are going to learn  
English and whether we are parenting them properly," said Kau Ontai,  
cradling her 2-year-old daughter Kamalei in one arm.

Her two older children attend the Punano Leo preschool. Her husband  
teaches the language. She studied it in high school, then achieved  
fluency as a Punano Leo volunteer.

Hawaiian is the voice of their home, yet the native language they  
speak marks them as alien to many in their island homeland.

"When we walk through a mall in Hawaii speaking Hawaiian, people are  
shocked," she said. "They stop us and ask: What about English? We  
hear Chinese being spoken, Japanese spoken, Filipino spoken. Nobody  
ever stops them in their tracks and says why are you speaking that?"

"For now, their first and only language is Hawaiian," she said of her  
children.

She is confident that they will learn English easily enough when the  
time comes.

"But my husband and I will never look into our children's eyes and  
speak English to them," she said. "That is something I could never do."

© 2000 Los Angeles Times
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