Trip Of The Tongue (language)

[Jelyn Gaskell]

Thanks for your input, can't wait to buy her book. When I worked in a school district in Northern CA as Special Ed teacher, I had a 7th grade African American student whom the psych and speech path gave diagnosis on(mental retardation and other related speech issues). He was placed in my SDC class. I worked with him, and he was verbally unintelligible, however when I used Visuals and PECS he was quite intelligent. After I consulted with three of my professors, (at the time Dr. Rickford's were my prof's(Stanford and SJSU) in classes and Dr. Stuart Ritterman SLP speech scientist,(CS Fresno emeritus) I took language samples and we discovered his father was a Gullah speaker from deep down highway one in Louisiana. He had met a woman in Las Vegas and married her and moved his kids to Oakland,CA which is how I got his son in my classroom. This boy sat with me with the computer and I asked him using LA maps to show me where he was from, after that I found his
 former teacher in his old Parish there. There are still Gullah speakers around, but this is an example of language displacement and how teachers need to be aware of 1st language issues.
Also, I blame NCLB and the English Language push without SIOP or Sheltered English, and bilingual language enhancement. Districts need to be sensitive to 1st language speakers of another language. 

--- On Tue, 3/6/12, Andre Cramblit <andrekaruk at NCIDC.ORG> wrote:

From: Andre Cramblit <andrekaruk at NCIDC.ORG>
Subject: [ILAT] Trip Of The Tongue (language)
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 12:00 PM

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/04/147728920/a-road-trip-in-search-of-americas-lost-languagesLINK TO LISTEN TO THE STORY.
 The vast majority of the 175 indigenous languages still spoken in the United States are on the verge of extinction.Linguist Elizabeth Little spent two years driving all over the country looking for the few remaining pockets where those languages are still spoken — from the scores of Native American tongues, to the Creole of Louisiana. The resulting book is Trip of the Tongue: Cross-Country Travels in Search of America's Lost Languages."I put, I think, 25,000 miles on my poor, long-lost Subaru that has since been consigned to the afterlife for cars," she tells Jackie Lyden, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered.The first part of the book deals with Native American languages such as Navajo. Little writes the language is disappearing fast. Among kindergartners in one reservation school district, fluency dropped from 89 percent at the beginning of the 1980s to just a few percent by the end of the decade. Little says one reason for its decline
 is that the Navajo community is less geographically and technologically isolated."Once there is more television, you know, cable television and the Internet, and once younger members of the tribe have more ability to be exposed to the English language, the heritage language really drops off pretty quickly," she says.Another example is Gullah. Once spoken by slaves and emancipated African-Americans in the low country of South Carolina, for years it was reviled as simply a butchered version of English. Through the generations, speakers became increasingly ashamed of that characterization.But there is a distinct influence of West African languages in Gullah's structure, Little says, showing a depth and complexity that many Gullah-speakers themselves didn't appreciate.In her estimation, that loss of language serves as a break from identity."The formation of our whole consciousness is framed by ... language," she said. "So when you take that language away,
 or even if it's forced out of a child or out of a adolescent ... that must be an incredible psychological trauma."
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