Tribes strive to save native tongues (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Tribes strive to save native tongues
In the Pacific Northwest, some 40 indigenous languages are at risk of
disappearing within a decade.

By Aaron Clark | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the May 23, 2008 edition

Warm Springs, Ore. - Grass-roots efforts to preserve and teach youngsters native
languages are intensifying around the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia as
about 40 indigenous tongues are in danger of disappearing within the next
decade.

Native leaders are compiling dictionaries, drafting lesson plans, and scrambling
to save what scraps of language they can before the last of the fluent elders
dies. In the case of Kiksht, a language spoken for centuries along Oregon's
Columbia River, there are two remaining speakers and neither can remember the
words for "yawn" or "brown."

Access full article link below:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0523/p02s01-usgn.html