Enduring Voices project survey shows languages at risk of extinction (fwd)

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Enduring Voices project survey shows languages at risk of extinction

© Indian Country Today October 17, 2007. All Rights Reserved
Posted: October 17, 2007
by: David Melmer / Indian Country Today
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096415926

RAPID CITY, S.D. - American Indian educators in the northern Great Plains
have advocated for language education. The result is that more than 30
percent of the Lakota people can speak their language.

Only the Navajo have a higher percentage of speakers.

According to a survey by the National Geographic Enduring Voices project,
many indigenous languages are headed for extinction very soon. Some
languages have only one elder speaker; and when a language disappears, so
does a culture.

The Enduring Voices study, conducted worldwide, identified regions across
the globe that were at risk of losing languages. In the United States, two
at-risk regions are in Oklahoma and the Pacific Northwest.

Every two weeks, a language dies somewhere in the world; and by the end of
the century, more than half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the
world will disappear, according to the study.

The reason for the language loss, the study noted, is that dominant
languages or the languages of powerful groups of people has taken hold
while the smaller groups' languages have been pushed aside.

''This occurs through official language policies or through the allure that
the high prestige of speaking an imperial language can bring,'' the study
stated.

In Indian country, boarding schools of the past prohibited American Indians
from speaking their language. Some of those people, now grandparents, did
not encourage their children to speak the language. However, in many cases,
the language remained underground and only resurfaced a generation ago.

Schools in Montana and South Dakota have now dedicated curriculum
instruction to the American Indian culture and languages. Just last year,
Montana provided funding for cultural and language curriculum in public
schools. South Dakota is searching for ways to incorporate indigenous
language and culture into its public school curriculum.

In California, according to the survey, 50 languages remain, none of which
is taught in the schools.

''Languages not learned by children are not just endangered, they are
doomed,'' Lyle Campbell, a linguist professor at the University of Utah,
told National Geographic.

Campbell said that to look at hotspots where language is diminishing may be
misleading.

''Essentially all Native languages are under threat.''

Gary Holton of the University of Alaska said that the definition of a
language and who counts as a speaker may be changing. Dialects have altered
languages to a degree when the dialect or slang becomes the language. He
added that some people who are partial speakers may someday be considered
fluent speakers.

In the Great Plains, educators and elders knew the clock was ticking on the
languages; and for at least a decade or more, every gathering of American
Indian educators has included workshops dedicated to the teaching of the
language and culture. Many of the schools in South Dakota include elders in
the student's language and cultural education, utilizing them as language
mentors.

Montana has implemented a diverse public school curriculum called Education
for All, and elders are present in many of the public schools as well as
reservation schools.

Some hotspots that were identified as at risk of losing a language are in
Bolivia, northern Australia, eastern Siberia and two locations in South
America.

Bolivia, according to Enduring Voices, had a more diversified language base
than all of Europe, but Spanish is crowding the other languages out.

It is estimated that 80 percent of natural species, which include plant and
animal life, have not been discovered by science but are known by the
people who live in the regions through oral history, according to David
Harrison, a linguistics professor at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College.
That knowledge is also at risk.

Many of the languages in North America were written down by religious clergy
who moved among the tribes. Today, books are written about the language by
fluent speakers in order to continue the original intent of the
pronunciation and meaning. One of the most acclaimed writers of the Lakota
language is Albert White Hat, Sicangu Lakota and director of the Lakota
language program at Sinte Gleska University.

He said to learn the dominant language doesn't mean that a person's original
language has to be sacrificed.

''Master the Western culture, master the English language; I don't have to
be like them if I learn their ways. Don't water academics down. Deal with
it. Knowledge doesn't force you into something,'' White Hat said.