Court rules against Yup ’'ik as an historically written language ...

[William J Poser]

I've found one useful piece of information. Here are the Department of
Justice's Guidelines for interpreting the Voting Rights Act:
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/28cfr/55/28cfr55.htm#anchor55_5

The portion of immediate relevance is this:

(c) Unwritten languages. Many of the languages used by language minority groups, for example, by some American Indians and Alaskan Natives, are unwritten.
With respect to any such language, only oral assistance and publicity are
required. Even though a written form for a language may exist, a language
may be considered unwritten if it is not commonly used in a written form.
It is the responsibility of the covered jurisdiction to determine whether a language should be considered written or unwritten.

So, it looks like the DOJ interprets the statute as using current literacy
as the criterion in spite of the term "historically unwritten".

Bill