Prayers in our Native Language

[Derksen Jacob]

Thanks for sharing that. I look forward to the youtube clip.

An area of interest for me is the role that religion and spirituality plays in both language shift and in language revitalization. 

It seems to me that language often hangs on in prayers and spiritual teachings and also plays a key role in inspiring people to learn, re-learn or teach their language. And, as much as religion of oppressors/ dominant culture has been instrumental in language shift, esp church run residential schools, it has also played a role in preserving language in Bibles, orthographies and so on, or in keeping it vital as is the case with Guarani in Paraguay.

If anyone knows of research related to the role that religion or spirituality plays in language revitalization, I'd be very grateful.

Best regards,

Jakob

 


Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:30:52 -0500
From: tdc.aaia at VERIZON.NET
Subject: [ILAT] Prayers in our Native Language
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU

Han Mitakuyapi,

Throughout the years, our program has been visited by members of our community asking for help from them with prayers.  In fact, if you ask adults why they want to learn their language, to be able to pray to the Creator in their language is often either the reason or the secondmost reason.

We are in the middle of a project to create three CDs of everyday language in Dakotah and all year long I have struggled with the idea of creating the third CD as parts of prayers.  The time has arrived to make this decision and I have decided not to.  

Each time we have been asked for help, I have saved whatever the elders worked on ... in fact, I never throw anything away, even drafts because no one might remember that word or those words later on.  So I do have what I would consider a "general" prayer and I will be putting this on youtube in the next few days.

I want people to know, though, that we are not saying that this is how you should pray, but simply offering this as one way that a group of elders came up with to help people who have asked for that help.

Pidamayaye.

Tammy DeCoteau
AAIA Native Language Program 		 	   		  
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