Family/community language learning is necessary to language survival

[Rudy Troike]

Wayne is right in stating that the *only* way for a community to keep its
language alive is to ensure that children learn the language from elders
when they are still young enough to absorb the language naturally. Because
those who have gone through standard Euro-american schooling have a model
and image of how a "foreign" language should be taught (which almost never
works in the first place), they tend to assume that this is how the native
language should be taught -- i.e., formally, following a curriculum,
memorizing words or expressions, etc. For numerous reasons, this approach
is doomed to failure as a way of perpetuating the living language, just as
it fails to succeed as a way of developing fluency in foreign languages in
school. The optimum age for language learning is before the age of formal
schooling, but the built-in biological ability to acquire language naturally
begins to decline rapidly as puberty approaches. We know from the experience
of the Navajo and Cherokee code-talkers that native languages can be adapted
to the most modern of cultural contexts. It is only a matter if speakers
choose to do this, or replace their use of native linguistic resources with
the dominant national language. By replacing native resources, I am referring
to the grammatical structure, not lexical items. All languages, English
included, become enriched through incorporation of vocabulary from other
sources for referring to novel elements of experience. It is not necessary,
in order to maintain the integrity of a language, to invent native terms
for every new thing. An instructive example comes from Korean -- one day
I asked some of my Korean students how to say in Korean, "I want a pen".
They laughed, and said, "I want a [in Korean]" "pen [in English]". When I
protested, and asked what they would call a pen in Korean, they laughed
again and said, "We would say 'pen'". But the grammatical frame for the
use of the word remains entirely in Korean. Aymara and Quechua are examples
of native languages which have incorporated numerous Spanish lexemes as
verb and noun bases, while retaining the complex and subtle grammatical
structure and semantic system, so that it is possible to talk or write
about even the most current technological and political developments in
the native language. Being able to talk about the complexities of modern
life emphatically does not mean having to give up the native language.
Unfortunately the issue is too often framed in this way as a choice,
putting the language in a museum mode as being of value only for expressing
traditional cultural matters but otherwise of no use. Community psychology
must change to embrace the use of the language for all aspects of life,
adopting terms and adapting usage as needed to maintain relevance. And
language learning must begin in the home and family in the natural way.
Any other way is the way to language death.

     Rudy Troike