Indigenous languages won=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99t_?=survive if kids are learning only English (fwd link)

[Wayne Leman]

As someone who grew up in an Alaskan Native village where our indigenous language was being lost during my language learning years and as a linguist who has worked since 1975 with a Native American language community that is losing their language, I feel terrible about indigenous languages being lost, but I don’t think schools can rescue a language. Languages are not learned at school. They are learned at home during the formative language learning years. Schools can provide one more disincentive for children to speak an indigenous language, but they can’t teach a language to children if children are not being taught the language from their primary caregivers at home. If children are being taught their language at home, then schools can reinforce that teaching. The problem is societal. Entire societies feel great pressure to discontinue use of indigenous languages in favor of dominant languages. one. It is very difficult for parents and other caregivers to teach indigenous languages to children if they have been taught to believe that children will be harmed by learning indigenous languages. It’s a difficult situation, but we must be careful not to put an unrealistic emphasis on the role that schools have in teaching language. Schools can create a great incentive for children not to continue speaking their indigenous languages, through coercion and even punishment which has been the case in the U.S. and some other countries, but I don’t think schools can do the converse, namely teach languages. (High school, college, and university programs seldom teach languages either. They typically expose students to languages and their structures, but not actually teach them the languages other than perhaps a few words, some elementary phrases, and grammar. People typically learn language when they are immersed in it, either at home or in cross-cultural experiences, study-abroad programs, etc.)

People don’t learn languages from modern technology either. Technology can make language learning more interesting, but it can’t do what primary care providers and other fluent speakers of a language must do, namely, expose people to language in context so much that they begin to understand and speak it.

I think that we linguists and others who have some professional training and lots of care for indigenous peoples and their languages can assist in language preservations efforts, but I have also concluded that we cannot do so by doing what I was trained to do and love to do, analyzing languages and writing up descriptions of them. Instead, we professionals need to learn how to encourage the development of language immersion programs. We can advocate for learning of indigenous languages, but it will fall on deaf ears if primary caregivers have concluded that their children are better off learning a dominant language.

I would like to see empirical evidence for any claim that schools can teach indigenous languages to children if the children are not also being immersed in those languages at home.

I hope that I am wrong in my claims but after many years of wrestling with this issue, it’s what I conclude.

Wayne
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http://www.cheyennelanguage.org
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