Language Survival in a Dangerous World

Mauricio J. Mixco

Introduction

In this essay I address three interrelated topics, offering, first, some examples of the nature, extent, and consequences of language endangerment; second, a historical overview of “the ideology of contempt” that underlies the deliberate obliteration of the language and culture of one community by those of another, and third, a sketch of a few representative case studies of the “Reversal of Language Shift”—that is, instances in the hopeful struggle for the survival of endangered languages and even the revival of a dead one. Its conclusion reports on some heartening developments at the University of Utah in defense of endangered languages.
I begin by briefly discussing the nature, degree and causes of language endangerment, also known as language shift, obsolescence, loss or extinction. Aside from the actual eradication of human populations or the disruption of their subsistence patterns, language extinction usually results when, for some other reason, the speakers of one language cease to pass their language on to their children, thereby allowing another language to take its place. Usually this other language has greater prestige and viability, regionally, nationally or internationally, and is lurking in the background, eventually coming to displace the endangered language in question.
Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the world’s 7000 or so extant languages are not threatened by extinction. If the process of language extinction cannot be reversed or at least attenuated, only a few languages with great political and cultural power are likely to survive by the end of this new century. Among languages that can be considered “safe” are obvious ones like the several large Chinese languages with an international profile (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu), and the largest languages of the Indian subcontinent (Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, etc.), of Africa (Hausa, Yoruba, Swahili, etc.), and of Southeast Asia (Vietnamese, Indonesian-Malay, possibly Thai). Of course, we also cannot omit Japanese, Arabic, Russian, and the few languages of Europe that have had a colonial legacy since the Second World War, including English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
What follow are two rather dramatic, though not atypical, examples of language shift through political violence or economic disaster.

I. Language Endangerment in the World Today

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a peasant revolt was brutally suppressed by the military dictatorship of the small Central American republic of El Salvador. The uprising resulted in the massacre of over 30,000 Pipil-speaking Indians, purportedly armed “communist rebels.” Almost overnight, the Pipil language all but vanished. Closely related to the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, Pipil was brought to Central America in the ninth century by conquering Toltecs from Mexico in much the same way Norman French entered England and Ireland. As would be the case for many speakers of the unrelated Mayan languages of Guatemala in the 1980s and of Chiapas (Mexico) in the 1990s, it was certain death to speak an Indian language in the El Salvador of the 1930s.
Of course, genocidal ethnic cleansing is only one of the culprits responsible for the disappearance of languages. In November 2003, the Salt Lake Tribune ran an article on the imminent extinction through cultural disintegration of a tiny, nomadic, hunting and gathering tribe, the Nukak-Makú Indians, who once inhabited the headwaters region of the Orinoco River in Colombia. Disease and the disappearance of game and other jungle foods, brought on in part by the rape of the rain forest by outsiders, have led the Nukak-Makú to abandon their indigenous way of life for a westernized, non-Indian life in town. They are also abandoning their moribund language, a member of a little-known language family, not closely related to any other in the world—in other words, unique and absolutely irreplaceable. Professor Lyle Campbell (introduced in more detail below) reports that the Nukak-Makú have even come to be seen as a kind of pariah tribe by the other native groups of the region. Like the civil wars in Central America, the destruction of the forest environment has precipitated a cataclysmic change in the lives of these Colombian Indians whose culture will soon vanish without a trace, taking with it the wisdom, practical and scientific knowledge uniquely encoded in the unstudied Nukak-Makú language.
While language extinctions have undoubtedly been a part of human history since its beginnings, the process has greatly accelerated under modern conditions, especially the process known as globalization. As stated above, accelerated language extinction has become a fact of life for the world’s 7000 surviving languages, wherever one of the aforementioned languages of political or economic power becomes dominant, while another less prestigious one fades into insignificance and eventual oblivion. This occurs when the speakers, like the Pipil, the Mayan groups or the Nukak-Makú, see, or are made to see, some advantage, real or imagined, in abandoning their ancestral language and culture for a new one offering greater access to opportunity or safety.
Such a “choice” is seldom a free one. Rather it is the result of a serious disparity in power between smaller local cultures and the overwhelming presence of larger global ones. Typically, endangered languages are spoken by communities experiencing some serious disadvantage or powerlessness relative to other groups. No community capriciously casts off its linguistic or cultural heritage for no reason at all. There is almost always an element of direct or indirect coercion involved, whether intended or not.
Endangered languages come in a great variety of forms. They may be heir to a noble literary tradition (like Irish, Yiddish, Welsh, or Occitan) or they may lack writing altogether, like Nukak-Makú. Yet we do well to remember that mere literacy is no measure of the significance of a language; after all, many of the great literary legacies of antiquity were initially in an oral form, like the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest Hindu Vedas, Homer, the Torah, the Norse sagas and many more.
Furthermore, an endangered language may be the patrimony of either an entire nation or a stateless group within a nation. The group may be indigenous or it may be an immigrant community. It may be rural or urban, tribal or ethnic, a majority or a minority. In the interest of space, I narrow the focus to a few of the more typical cases in our own hemisphere. The indigenous languages of the Americas are among those most threatened by Language Shift. Yet many of the causes of endangerment and the strategies to counteract them in this hemisphere, can and do apply to endangered languages anywhere. Thus, narrowing our focus geographically in this essay does not restrict it conceptually.
At first European contact, there were more than 2,000 indigenous languages in the Americas. Fewer than 200 survive today in the United States and Canada and about 450 in the rest of the Americas. As with Pipil and Nukak-Makú, many of these languages continue to pass into oblivion each year. As stated above, predictions are that, if nothing is done to slow the present rate of language loss, 90% of the roughly 7000 languages in the world will not survive to the end of this century. In the best-case scenario, 35% to 50% will die.
Most Native American languages are at risk. Of the 160-80 North American languages, 155 are near death. Only some 20 (that is, around, 11%) are being passed on to children. Unless conditions change, these languages are doomed to disappear with this generation of adult speakers. Compare this situation to the list of “world” languages above that are probably immune to this threat, given their large numbers and protected political or economic status.
It is not just individual languages and cultures that are dying out. Whole families or stocks of languages are disappearing. In the Americas, with more than 50% of the independent language families in the world, several entire families have already vanished. The disappearance of each individual language is a major loss of scientific and humanistic knowledge; it might be roughly compared in seriousness to the loss of a biological species like the panda or the Bengal tiger. However, the extinction of a whole family of languages is a tragedy comparable to the loss of a whole branch of the animal kingdom, say, all sea mammals or all flightless birds. Imagine zoology with such a major branch missing! This gives some sense of what is lost as more and more American Indian languages and even whole families become extinct without a successful reversal of the process of extinction or even the adequate documentation of the languages prior to their disappearance.
Thoughtful people around the world have come to realize that language endangerment is one of the greatest challenges confronting humanity today. Documenting, preserving and revitalizing these unknown or poorly described languages are all essential for a fuller, non-ethnocentric understanding of human intellectual and spiritual life. In some cases, help may come to a dying language through its own community’s economic development or literacy programs and educational reforms. Survival can also result from the rectification of material, moral and legal wrongs done to its disadvantaged speakers. Ultimately, however, survival may depend most on the linguistic tenacity of the individual home and family.
Here are a few of the many arguments for the value to humanity of endangered languages, taken from the fields of psychology, literature, history and linguistics. Psychologists have long understood that each language and culture is fundamental to the mental and social integrity of its speakers, especially the young. Furthermore, much of the cultural, aesthetic and intellectual life of both individuals and peoples is experienced and expressed through language. Imagine trying to participate actively, or even passively, in a culture without knowing its language. It would be like viewing a foreign film with no subtitles. As I have intimated, the life-enriching value of literature is no less manifest in oral than in written literature: it too struggles with the mysteries of the cosmos and the complexities of human existence. Its loss means the reduction of the potential ways of experiencing and understanding the passion, beauty, knowledge and wisdom of the world’s peoples.
History is fundamental to any culture, and yet much undocumented knowledge of the past, recoverable sometimes only from an oral tradition, is lost forever with the extinction of its language. For example, determining the family affiliations of a language can help uncover its origins, past contacts and prehistoric migrations even without archaeology or genetics. Here are two brief examples: Linguistic evidence alone has helped link the Navajo and Apache languages of the American Southwest, along with certain languages of the Northwestern California coast, to a prehistoric, ancestral Athabaskan language and homeland in the interior of British Columbia and Alaska still occupied by their linguistic relatives within the Athabaskan language family. This link implies at least two major north-to-south Athabaskan migrations to the destinations just identified. Perhaps a thousand miles now separate the three Athabaskan branches one from the other.
A similar case is that of two small languages on the same Northern California coast, Yurok and Wiyot; these languages have been shown to be collateral sister branches within a larger, ancestral Algic “super-family.” The third branch is the vast Algonquian language family, whose closest members on the Great Plains (viz., Cree, Blackfoot, Gros Ventres, Cheyenne and Arapaho) are some thousand miles to the east. Algonquian languages distantly related to these were the first to be encountered by early English settlers along the Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth century.
Each of the small California Algic and Athabaskan groups is so perfectly assimilated to its respective cultural and natural surroundings that no material evidence remains of its physical ties to related groups or original homelands elsewhere for archaeologists, anthropologists or geneticists to uncover. The evidence for these ties came to light solely through the linguistic reconstruction of the respective ancestral or “proto-languages,” the historical source of these two far-flung families, proto-Algic and proto-Athabaskan. Thus, we suffer serious scientific loss when linguistic data like those preserved in these little-known languages slip beyond our reach through the process of language extinction. Lacking a written record for the most part, the cultural history of the western hemisphere must be extracted from archaeological, paleontological and linguistic analyses like those just exemplified. Its contributions to prehistory aside, the discipline of linguistics has even more ambitious goals, one of which is to hypothesize about the structure of the human mind itself through the scientific study of what is possible and what is not possible in human language. It is clear that language is the aspect of cognition most amenable to direct scientific analysis, given its highly structured and rule-governed nature. Consequently, our theories of human cognition are considerably impoverished as the available sample of languages shrinks through attrition.
As we proceed, I introduce some syntactic examples to exemplify the type of insights lost through language death. The basic order of subject, verb and object in the declarative sentence facilitates predictions about many other sentence- and word-building patterns throughout a given language and across languages in general. Thus, languages like English and Spanish, with Subject-Verb-Object declarative order (the boy sees the dog), predictably tend to place prepositions before nouns to mark certain oblique or “indirect” grammatical cases (e.g., on the ground, in the bottle, through the woods, etc.). The Mayan, Austronesian (Pacific) and Celtic languages behave similarly, though they have a variant of this Verb-Object order (with the position of the Subject not playing a diagnostic role), in which the verb is in sentence-initial position followed by the subject and the direct object (sees the boy the dog); they nonetheless mark oblique cases in the same way as English and Spanish. However, languages like Japanese and Turkish with an Object-Verb order (the boy the dog sees) are likely to have postpositions, or suffixes occurring after the noun, for the same semantic purpose (e.g., the ground on, the bottle in, the woods through, etc.). Similarly, the Verb-Object type of language places relative or modifying clauses after the modified noun (the house that is on the hill); the Object-Verb type places it before (the on the hill house, etc.). Linguistic theory seeks to explain the cognitive principles that underlie these patterns and the constraints that delimit them.
Because they had never been encountered, it was once thought that word orders like Object-Subject-Verb and Object-Verb-Subject were ruled out by some inherent limitation in human cognitive capacity, thus accounting for their presumed “universal absence” from human languages. However, these specific word orders did turn up in a few, previously unknown, languages of the Amazon Basin. It thus became clear that earlier hypotheses were in error about such cognitive limitations. Yet the possibility had been all too real that these Amazonian languages could have become extinct before the discovery of the “exotic” sentence sequences, leaving us with false or incomplete conclusions about universal constraints on human language and consequently on human cognitive structure.
Some eighty percent of the world’s languages belong to the Subject-Object-Verb or Subject-Verb-Object type, perhaps eighteen percent belong to the verb-initial (Verb-Subject-Object) variety, while a mere two percent belong to the most exotic types to be found in South America’s rain forest. Indeed, since they are generally recognized as, at one and the same time, among the structurally most unusual and most imperiled in the world, the unstudied languages of the Americas, as well as those of Australia, New Guinea, Northeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, require documentation and analysis on an extremely urgent basis.

II. A Root Cause of Endangerment

Throughout history, peoples around the world have invaded and conquered others. Military defeat has often been the prelude to centuries of oppression of the vanquished by the conquerors, abusing their political, human and economic rights. Freedom, lands and resources are lost.
Though currently affecting mostly post-colonial and traditional, often tribal, societies, this tragedy actually originates in Europe, where nation-states emerged in the medieval and early modern period through the conquest of one group by another, usually in a multi-ethnic and multilingual free-for-all. There is virtually no country in modern Europe without one or more historic ethnic and/or linguistic minorities; the latter are often at the low end of the power hierarchy as a consequence of the political struggles of the past.
Of course, the above picture may occasionally be reversed—it has occasionally been a powerful minority that rules a subordinate majority—recall Norman England and Ireland or even the Incas of the Andes and the Toltecs in Mexico and Central America. Thus it is clear that Europe has not been unique. Virtually every continent has a comparable history; it just happens that we are more likely to be acquainted with these circumstances in our own tradition.
In the early stages of nation-building, during periods of political, economic, religious or territorial consolidation, wealth and power typically come to be concentrated in the hands of one dominant ethnolinguistic group. Governments established by such groups live in fear of the potential divisiveness of competing regional, religious, ethnic and language loyalties and have continuously sought to stifle religious, regional and ethnic autonomy, especially when buttressed by a distinct language. Rulers have therefore also sought to delegitimize such languages, especially by denigrating them and denying them equal status. Harsh political measures have been brought to bear to suppress or eradicate stigmatized languages and cultures. This has been the fate of groups like the Kurds in the Near East, the Ainu in Japan or the Hmong in Southeast Asia.
These patterns have persisted down to the present, motivated by what can be referred to as an “ideology of contempt”—that is, an ingrained prejudice, perhaps initially motivated by fear, against any minority’s self-manifestations, especially its language, the most powerful vehicle of culture. This persecution is frequently accompanied by a sense of entitlement on the part of the language group in power. History reveals that linguistic and ethnic cleansing have often gone hand in hand (Dorian 3-21).
In the interest of space, I limit myself to two representative cases in Europe: Spain and France. By 1474 post-medieval Spain had emerged victorious after some 800 years of struggle against its erstwhile Moslem conquerors. The kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united through the dynastic marriage of the “Most Catholic Monarchs,” Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castilla. In 1492 their reign oversaw several formative events: Spain reached America with Columbus; Granada, the last Moslem stronghold, fell to a Christian army; and all Jews refusing to convert to Catholicism were expelled from Spain. Later, uprisings of the Moriscos, crypto-Moslem converts to Christianity, were brutally suppressed and the rebels likewise expelled. Finally, Spanish became the first European vernacular codified in a grammar by Antonio de Nebrija (also pronounced Lebrija).
Spain was long referred to as “the Spains,” because, as its power grew, Castile, the core of the future nation, aside from spearheading the drive against the Islamic powers, known as the Reconquista or “Reconquest,” subjugated several rival Christian polities or ethnic groups in the Iberian Peninsula along the way, each with its own language and culture: Basque, Galician Portuguese, Asturo-Leonese, Navarro-Aragonese, Catalán and Mozárabe; this last had for centuries been the Romance language of Christians under Moslem rule. With the influx of the northern Romance vernaculars into formerly Moslem territories where Mozárabe had predominated for centuries as an unwritten vernacular, the latter became extinct and Latin displaced Arabic as the language of science, culture and officialdom. Nevertheless, modern Castilian in particular still owes virtually all of its medieval technical vocabulary to the Arabic spoken by bilingual Mozárabes; usually by way of Spanish, other European languages have also borrowed such Arabisms as algebra, algorithm, alcohol, azimuth, cotton, nadir, zenith, zero, orange, rice, sugar, and many more.
Until recently, the surviving languages of Spain have endured centuries of state-sponsored Castilian linguistic hegemony, which can be traced to the twelfth century, when this vernacular language replaced Latin as the chancery language of Alfonso X of Castile. In the fifteenth century, the court of the “Catholic Monarchs” favored Castilian over all other peninsular vernaculars. For example, contrary to time-honored practice, Fernando—himself an Aragonese—addressed his Catalán subjects, regardless of their heritage language, exclusively in Castilian rather than his own Aragonese language, which bears more similarities to their Catalán than does Castilian. By 1716 Felipe V had outlawed Catalán in the law courts. In 1768 Carlos III imposed the teaching of Castilian in Aragon. By 1780 the Crown extended this requirement to the entire realm.
The next century saw phases of Castilianization punctuated by brief periods of linguistic pluralism. In 1810, for example, during the Napoleonic interlude, Catalán was legalized only to be outlawed again by Fernando VII after the expulsion of the French in 1825. In the nineteenth century, Galician and Catalán enjoyed brief, elitist literary revivals. However, they would have to wait until the latter part of the twentieth century to come into their own once again.
Before its overthrow in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, the Spanish Republic in its Constitution of 1931, proclaimed the regional languages as co-official with Castilian in their respective provinces. Generalissimo Francisco Franco, ironically a Galician by birth, held Spain in his dictatorial grip from 1939 to 1970. Under his fascistic regime, the “ideology of contempt” reached its zenith in Spain. All non-Castilian languages became illegal “dialects.” At one time or another, speaking or publishing in a minority language constituted sedition against the state. In 1940 a decree ensured the prosecution, without the possibility of due process or appeal, of any clergyman, government bureaucrat or educator accused of speaking anything but Castilian in public in any part of Spain.
With Franco’s death, centuries of linguistic repression quickly came to an end. The Constitution of 1969 granted political autonomy and new linguistic freedoms to the regions under the UNESCO guidelines on minority cultural rights. Ironically, today Barcelona is not only the hotbed of publication in Catalán; it has virtually outstripped Madrid, Mexico City and Buenos Aires as the world capital of publishing in Castilian.
Of course, this history of language hegemony is not unique to Spain. In France, for example, the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade was the religious pretext for the northern French language, culture and political interests to crush the native Occitan culture and language of the more ancient South. After the French Revolution in 1789, Breton (closely related to Welsh), Catalán, Gascon, Occitan, Alsatian (German) and other regional languages remained at the pejorative level of patois (uncouth dialect). Similarly, in the British Isles, English displaced the Celtic languages of Cornish, Welsh, Manx and the two varieties of Gaelic, Irish and Scots.
In the American colonial empires, European linguistic hegemony assailed this hemisphere. Unfortunately, the independent American republics only perpetuated the ideology of contempt with regard to indigenous languages and cultures. Major Indian languages are still thought of as mere dialectos by large segments of the populace, even the educated, in many parts of Latin America. Needless to say, in the United States indigenous peoples have routinely been deprived of their linguistic, religious and cultural rights, as they have lost their ancestral lands and resources. Until relatively recently, Indians had no civil or human rights, just the proverbial “Trails of Tears and broken treaties.”
The ideology of contempt created the now-defunct, assimilationist government- and church-run boarding schools that wrenched Indian children from their parents in order to mold them into Anglo-American, Christian “clones” by severing their indigenous linguistic and cultural roots, all the while denying them the rights of citizenship until 1924. The barrack-like buildings of the former Intertribal school still stand in Brigham City, not far from the Idaho border in Utah, bearing mute testimony to this sordid practice.
Native adults over the age of 60 who suffered cultural oppression in these schools have been deprived of any pride in their indigenous heritage. One Native Alaskan elder complains that he can still taste the soap used to wash his mouth out as punishment for speaking his language at school. This same generation of elders later refused to pass on the burden of their language and culture in order to shelter their children and grandchildren from the humiliation and trauma they had lived through. A similar situation can be found in many parts of the Americas and the world at large, and under such hostile treatment, it is a tribute to the sheer endurance of these remarkable people that any native cultures or languages have survived at all. And yet, some have! Others are still fighting for survival. I now move on to discuss what is being done to counteract the causes of language loss.

III. Responses to Language Endangerment

In years past, the publication by an academic linguist of a reference grammar, dictionary and collection of narrative texts brought closure to the basic scientific task of “documenting” an indigenous language, a scholarly agenda laid down by Franz Boas in the late nineteenth century, when he founded the fields of anthropology and linguistics in the Americas. However, the modern crisis of language endangerment has sparked a new sense of urgent proactivism among both linguists and indigenous communities, often leading to a fruitful collaboration between them. Increasingly, too, speakers of indigenous languages have themselves sought linguistic and pedagogical training in order to address, on their own, the technical problems involved in language maintenance and revitalization.
In the United States the African-American struggle for civil rights of the mid-twentieth century rekindled a dormant pride in their cultural heritage among many minorities. Language became an important symbol in this cultural rebirth. Federal and some state monies were even made available for so-called “bilingual education” targeting large and small minorities. In an idealized, properly conceived model of bilingual education, a child’s home language should serve for instruction in all academic subjects to obviate any disadvantage a student might experience in having to seek access to basic education in an unfamiliar language. At first the dominant language should only be approached as one among many other academic subjects. Unfortunately, less enlightened implementations of the “bilingual” approach have been more typical. These unfortunate models have introduced children to a mere token smattering of their heritage language at random throughout the school week, while prematurely forcing them into monolingual English classes in the counterproductive practice known as “mainstreaming.”
Flawed applications like this have been progressively replaced by more productive and humane approaches to bilingualism. One such is the “immersion” method, which asserts that a faltering heritage language can be reinvigorated in much the same manner that language is acquired naturally in early childhood—that is, by exclusive exposure to the target language in natural daily settings—thereby establishing a degree of comfortable passive comprehension that eventually develops, through well-documented stages, into increasingly native-like speech and, eventually, reading and writing too. The latter skills are more easily transferred from a first (albeit minority) language to a second than they are learned initially in the second (dominant) language.
Many psychological and cultural benefits derive from a focus on spoken language in education. First, in indigenous communities, with strictly oral traditions, the only fluent speakers and authentic bearers of culture left are the elderly. This situation gives often shut-in elders a chance to share their culture with the young and to reactivate their daily use of the language, which may have lain dormant for lack of contact with other fluent peers. Second, the oral approach teaches children to view their older relatives as valued human beings and as a cultural and emotional resource to be cherished as repositories of wisdom and the traditional lifeways. Under the elders’ nurturing guidance, children also learn self-esteem as the legitimate heirs to a patrimony of which they can be justly proud rather than embarrassed by. The media, popular literature and pseudo-science have too often caricatured the cultures of tribal peoples around the world, thereby doing irreparable psychological harm to generations of children. Furthermore, contemporary and future generations benefit from native-language publications, as well as audio and video recordings of elders performing traditional language acts, thus building a permanent archive of their cultural heritage.
In properly conceived, school-based immersion programs, great emphasis is placed on reinforcement of the language at home and in the community, recalling Joshua Fishman’s maxim that the home is the last bulwark and hearth of language preservation and revitalization: Parents who can commit to the exclusive use of the language with their children. If the household lacks fluent speakers, contact is provided through after-school recreational activities, extending the immersion experience. In addition, day trips and summer camps provide needed continuity in authentic contexts beyond school with many culturally enriching linguistic experiences.

IV. Selected Native American Language Revitalization Case Studies

In what follows, I briefly summarize case studies of indigenous communities responding to the crisis of language loss with successful language maintenance and revitalization programs. I have intentionally chosen studies from four distinct North American culture areas and from radically unrelated language families in two of the areas, namely: the Keresan and Athabaskan families in the Southwestern Cultural Region, and the Iroquoian and Algonquian families in the Northeastern Cultural Region (which includes Eastern Canada). The discussion of the California Region does not target specific languages, whereas in the Great Basin I focus on Shoshoni, a Uto-Aztecan language of the Great Basin, distantly related to Pipil and Nahuatl mentioned above. I begin in the Southwest.
With their 200,000 population, the Navajo constitute the largest tribe in the United States. Just after the Second World War, Navajo was spoken by all generations everywhere on its vast reservation. For that reason the language was long considered one of the few indigenous languages in the United States immune to language endangerment. Recently, however, alarming patterns of language shift were detected among the youngest children whose families had moved from more rural settings to the reservation’s burgeoning towns in which the dominant language is English. Most kindergarteners were speaking only English, whereas a decade or so earlier they had spoken only Navajo. These results prompted an official response from tribal authorities and educators.
In 1992 Paul R. Platero, an academic linguist and Navajo tribal member, reported on the decline of Navajo as a home language and on an alarmingly chaotic language-education situation in the reservation Head Start Programs (Hinton and Hale 88-97). There were too few fluent Navajo teachers, most with little or no pedagogical training, applying unproductive and misguided teaching techniques, focused on mindless literacy rather than authentically oral communicative competence. Paradoxically, at school real but unwitting “immersion” was only in English! Even elderly classroom aides, though fluent in Navajo, spoke little to no Navajo to the children in their charge at school.
Corrective measures have been in place since Platero’s report, occasionally contending with the resistance of non-Navajo teachers and school administrators. Most impressive have been approaches modeled on the immersion techniques of the highly successful New Zealand Maori pre-school “language nests,” in which elders and children speak nothing but the native language as they immerse themselves in the traditional Maori culture along with other academic subjects. . . . Programs at the elementary, middle and secondary levels follow the pre-school exposure.
Members of the Navajo grandparent generation, together with fluent, well-trained teachers at all levels, now serve as models of authentic language and culture. Through the successful collaboration between Navajo tribal authorities, linguists, educators and school administrators, the language is now used in many official contexts and has even achieved incorporation into higher-education curricula in tribal colleges and a regional university. Indigenous educators attend frequent institutes and workshops to plumb the depths of Navajo linguistics, thus enhancing their language competence and teaching skills.
The agriculturalist Pueblo neighbors of the Navajo in the Four-Corners region of the Southwest are heirs to an ancient archaeological pedigree dating back nearly two millennia. Though they spoke languages from four distinct families, Tanoan, Keresan, Hopian, and Zunian, in 1680 the Pueblos successfully rebelled in a coordinated strike against the Spanish intruders after nearly a century of abuse. Though reconquered twelve years later, the Pueblo peoples had convincingly secured a more respectful co-existence from their colonizers. After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, that peace continued relatively unperturbed. Modern disruption came with the conquest of northern Mexico by the United States; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 ceded approximately half of Mexico’s national territory to the victors, from the Pacific Coast to roughly the Mississippi River.
In two Keresan-speaking Pueblos, Acoma (to the west of Albuquerque) and Cochití (to the north), an urgent response to language endangerment was called for. It was discovered that the English-speaking public schools, massive English-speaking tourism, the flight of tribesmen in pursuit of off-reservation work, the onslaught of radio and television, but especially the loss of lands and resources to large corporate interests and local non-Indians, were all jeopardizing the status of the two native languages and cultures to the point of endangerment. A successful legal struggle to restore land, water and mineral rights catalyzed educational reforms. For example, my late colleague at the University of Utah, Wick R. Miller, an expert in Acoma linguistics among other competences, was invited by the tribe to present language workshops for Acoma educators in the 1980s.
As with the Navajo, appropriate measures were taken in each pueblo to encourage the use of the languages at home and in public; participation in local religious and other cultural traditions was also rekindled and teachers trained in immersion techniques were introduced to the native school systems. Official policies privileged the native languages in public tribal settings. Non-speakers needed to bring interpreters to do business in the language at the tribal offices. All these measures have led to moderate but continuing success in stemming the tide that once eroded the use of the native languages among the younger generations.
We now move on to Canada and the Northeastern Region, where from the 1600s onward the Iroquoian-speaking peoples became adept at exploiting European conflicts over the fur trade, though they often paid the price for ruinous military alliances with one European colony while fighting another, armed with superior weapons. Respected for their great skill in the arts of war and peace, these Indians established the Iroquois League, a confederacy balancing local and central authority. Apart from their hairstyle, the Mohawk are renowned for working as riveters at great heights, starting with many nineteenth-century railroad bridges and moving to twentieth-century skyscrapers across the northeast, including the World Trade Center towers.
Québec Province, with its large French-Canadian majority in a predominantly English-speaking country, has long been a world leader in bilingual education and in the development of immersion language-teaching methodologies. At Caughnawaga, a Mohawk village near Montréal, these Iroquoian people have developed an exemplary immersion program to ensure the continued transmission of the language from old to young in the community and in the schools. The Mohawk program has even had imitators, including the much-respected New Zealand and Hawaiian programs mentioned above.
Kaia’titahke Annette Jacobs, a Mohawk educator, writes that, “Prior to the 1970s, the only thing native in our schools were the children. There were no native teachers, no native content, no relevant [native] history, no [native] stories, no [native] songs, no pictures [of natives] and least of all no [native] language.” This is a situation not unlike the others discussed previously.
In a 1976 language survey conducted by the Ottawa Museum of Man, it was revealed that Mohawk parents were neglecting to pass on the language at home, taking language transmission for granted. Under the initiative of a small group of concerned Mohawk teachers, native language education began, starting with only fifteen minutes of Mohawk a day in every grade. By 1989 Mohawk immersion had reached the sixth grade. Since the 1990s, at least 50% of all students in the two community schools have been opting for the Mohawk immersion track. Mohawk is well on its way to recovery. Next we move back to the Pacific Coast.
California was colonized by the Spanish in the 1770s and, like the rest of this region of recently independent Mexico, transferred to the United States under the aforementioned 1848 treaty—just in time for the Gold Rush of 1849, a disaster for the native peoples in the remote hinterlands of the Sierra Nevada and the northernmost coastal areas, who had managed to escape the ravages of Spanish colonization only to fall prey to genocidal, mostly Anglo-American gold miners and ranchers. European diseases, forced labor and warfare had already decimated the coastal populations during the Spanish mission period.
With a native population once numbering over half a million, aboriginal California had had the densest native population north of Mesoamerica. It was now reduced to a miniscule number of surviving fluent speakers across some 20 of its original 25 distinct language families. Large school programs are clearly not feasible for each tiny, endangered native California language community. Consequently, a program on a more manageable scale has been developed.

The Master-Apprentice Program, developed by linguistics professor Leanne Hinton at UC Berkeley in collaboration with the Lannan Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, is based on a contract between at least two adults per native language, referred to as a Master and an Apprentice. The pair promises that, during a three-year period, the master, a fluent and culturally knowledgeable, usually elderly, speaker and the apprentice, typically a younger, non-fluent or non-speaking member of the same tribe, will communicate with each other exclusively in the indigenous language, employing a rigorous, adult-oriented immersion format which tends to emphasize the presentation of the traditional culture without neglecting the language of everyday life in a natural context.
After a weekend of initial orientation and training, the apprentice agrees to take an active part in learning the language from the master, behaving simultaneously as a linguistic researcher and as a person communicating exclusively in that language. The master commits to being, not a “language instructor,” but rather a patient and responsive mentor sworn to native monolingualism. Both initially rely on other communicative skills, including often hilarious body language and pantomime.
As is typical in most immersion settings, literacy is postponed in order to heighten attention to meaningful spoken communication. The interaction between master and apprentice is completely contextual and practical. Many routine activities of daily adult life provide opportunities to communicate without English: doing errands, doctor’s visits, church services, shopping for a meal, cooking, dining, washing up, gardening, driving, home and car maintenance, tending livestock and so on.
Like most Native American languages, the California languages are extremely complex in their grammatical structure. With the help of Berkeley linguistics graduate students, an apprentice can mine any available reference grammars, dictionaries, text collections or ethnographies, etc. To date, a total of 65 teams in 20 languages have completed the program with varying degrees of success.
Returning once again to the Atlantic seaboard, we come to the Algonquian family, surrounding the Iroquoians in aboriginal times, and occupying an immense region from the Atlantic Coast to the Rockies. I have already mentioned the two small, breakaway California sisters of Algonquian in the Algic “super-family.”
Aside from many Algonquian place names, early seventeenth-century contact yielded a few other loanwords in English: wigwam and wickiup meaning “house,” papoose “baby,” squaw “woman,” moccasin “shoe,” pemmican “trail mix” and animal names like moose, chipmunk, skunk, etc. Wampanoag has not been spoken for nearly 300 years. It was once one of the Algonquian languages of the southern Massachusetts coast and nearby islands. Despite the language’s defunct status, closely related languages are still extant, at least minimally. Furthermore, the Algonquian family as a whole is among the best researched in all of North America. There is now a vast literature on Algonquian descriptive and historical linguistics. Thus, even if there were no written records in Wampanoag, linguists would still have a good idea of its sounds and grammatical structures through comparison with the extant sister languages.
Fortunately, written records in Wampanoag have actually survived. During the early 1600s a Cambridge University-educated English missionary, the Reverend John Eliot, translated the Bible and wrote religious tracts in a language closely related to Wampanoag. Furthermore, due to early native literacy, we have a number of specimens of Wampanoag personal correspondence, diaries, devotional materials, etc.
The most remarkable element in the Wampanoag story, perhaps, is the persistence and commitment of the modern tribal members who have wanted so desperately to see their language restored. Among them is Jessie Little Doe Fermino, who realized that she needed advanced linguistic training to make the best use of the wealth of documents for language revitalization. Consequently, she trained in academic linguistics at MIT, in Noam Chomsky’s own Linguistics Department; she now heads the program and is training others to work toward reviving the language.
I have chosen the Wampanoag story as an example of the passion that a people can feel for what they consider to be among their greatest cultural treasures, their “beloved language,” as Joshua Fishman has called languages on the brink of extinction. Clearly the Wampanoag are but one example of a people willing to invest their resources, endure any sacrifice and work for as long as it takes in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, until they can hear their ancestral language on the lips of their children and of their children’s children once again.
To conclude this brief survey, we come to the Shoshoni language in our own region, the Great Basin. Recently the University of Utah’s Department of Linguistics has obtained National Science Foundation (NSF) support for the preservation of the Wick R. Miller Collection of manuscript, print materials, and some 119 tape recordings in the Shoshoni language. Prof. Wick R. Miller, previously mentioned in connection with the Acoma language, was the founder of interdisciplinary Linguistics Program that preceded the present Linguistics Department. Because of his premature death in Mexico nearly ten years ago, Prof. Miller was unable to bring these materials to a proper state of accessibility. The vulnerable original tape recordings will now be remastered and copied for use in transcription, translation and eventual publication of their many myths, legends and historical narratives; the manuscript materials will likewise be entered into a computer database for similar purposes. The entire Miller Collection will be available for enhanced public access at the Special Collections Department of the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, directly in copy formats and through a variety of reference publications, including a grammar, dictionary and a collection of narrative texts. This NSF project will also allow me to continue linguistic research on Shoshoni begun in the spring of 2004, in collaboration with a long-term language maintenance and revitalization effort envisioned by the Northwest Band of the Shoshoni Nation, whose tribal headquarters are located in Brigham City, Utah.
Shoshoni must be included among the languages described as not “safe” in the introductory section of this essay. The language is a member of the Numic linguistic family. (The word Numic is based on the native word numu “(Indian) person; human being” in these languages. The “u” vowels of the word are pronounced with a vowel sound closest to the vowel in English “suds.”) On a linguistic map of our region, the Numic family (one of seven branches of the far-flung Uto-Aztecan family; Pipil and Nahuatl, mentioned earlier, belong to the Nahuatlan or Aztecan branch) is displayed as a large, irregular isosceles triangle, consisting of three wedges radiating into the Great Basin from an apex in the Mojave Desert of Southern California in three branches: Western, Central and Southern Numic.
The Central branch contains the Shoshoni language, which in turn comprises various, rather fluid dialect zones. In pre-contact times, the language extended over a vast area; from near Death Valley it swept eastward and northward across southern, central and western Nevada, into western Utah abutting on the Wasatch Front, northward into Idaho as far as the Bitteroot Mountains and into western Wyoming from the Wind River Mountains as far as Yellowstone Park. The Comanche, who speak a Shoshoni dialect (on the verge of becoming a separate language) continued the Drang nach Osten. After acquiring the horse in the sixteenth century, these renowned equestrian hunters, warriors and marauders of the southern Great Plains first erupted into what later became the Dakota Territory in the eighteenth century, displacing the Kiowa among other tribes. They then proceeded to push southward, to the northeastern borders of New Spain in order to ensure easier access and a monopoly at the source of Spanish horses in the Texas and New Mexico colonies. Professor John McLaughlin, a Utah State University linguist and member of our National Science Foundation team, specializes in Comanche linguistic research; he recently related to me that at one time a Comanche warrior with fewer than a hundred horses was considered impoverished.
In three years’ time, with the successful conclusion of the University of Utah NSF project, access to the Wick R. Miller Collection will alter forever the quantity and quality of the oral literature available in Shoshoni. All the Shoshoni-speaking tribes across the region will be able to receive digitized copies of long-lost stories that they may have heard from contemporaries of their grandparents or great-grandparents. These narratives contain a treasure trove of myths, legends, tribal and personal histories which are preserved in the collection but have yet to see the light of day. Publications of reference materials issuing from the project will provide Shoshoni revitalization projects with much-needed materials that have remained virtually sealed away in this highly vulnerable state.
These recordings preserve the speech of an older generation of speakers, now deceased, many of whom were born in the nineteenth century, and were thus strongly representative of the language and narrative traditions of the ancestral Shoshoni people no longer familiar to the younger generations. When we have transcribed and translated these tapes, the collection of publishable Shoshoni literary and ethnographic materials will be nearly quadrupled. However, this is an urgent task indeed. The fluent speakers who can still help interpret the recordings are quite elderly. We cannot count on their being available for such demanding work indefinitely. While these texts will prove invaluable to our deeper understanding of the older Shoshoni language and culture, only a community with willing speakers can “maintain” or “revitalize” the infinite capacity of a living language for creativity and change. It literally “takes a village” to accomplish the revival of a language.
This NSF project is being initiated on the eve of the arrival of Professor Lyle Campbell and the founding of a center for endangered Native American languages and cultures at the University of Utah, a development I will discuss in my conclusion.

V. Conclusion

As discussed above, the root causes of language endangerment and extinction are many and complex. Historically, there has always been a struggle between the powerful and the not-so-powerful among the world’s languages and cultures. In modern times, and especially most recently, the most powerful culprit has been the complex process of cultural globalization. Youngsters shift from “local” to prestigious “world” languages almost as easily as they buy logo T-shirts, thereby opting for the winners of the “language wars” as they abandon their heritage languages.
Lest we disparage the seemingly Sisyphean task of the relatively tiny number of modern linguists working to preserve and revitalize the multitude of endangered languages around the world, recall the prestigious Etruscans (to whom the Romans sent their children to be educated). As intriguing as any of the ancients of the Mediterranean Basin, they have remained mute across the millennia—because only partially deciphered fragments of the still mysterious Etruscan language remain as merely formulaic tomb inscriptions. Unlike those of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, any fuller Etruscan written records that may have existed have long since vanished, perhaps destroyed by the rebellious early Romans as they threw off their Etruscan yoke.
In more recent history, we can thank sixteenth-century Spanish missionary language documentation in Mexico, among other important linguistics treasures, for the multi-volume encyclopedia of Aztec culture entitled The Things of New Spain (also known as the Florentine Codex). This opus was taken down in Nahuatl but written in the Latin alphabet by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his teams of trained native scribes. The work was made available in its first bilingual, English-Nahuatl edition by the University of Utah Press. This mammoth translation was the magnum opus of another Utah professor, the late Aztec scholar Prof. Charles E. Dibble of our Anthropology Department. Coincidentally, it was Professor Dibble who first contacted Mary R. Haas, chair of Linguistics at Berkeley, when Utah was recruiting its first anthropological linguist. This turned out to be Wick R. Miller, who in turn was Director of Linguistics when I was hired some years after finishing my own doctoral work under Professor Haas.
While the Aztec traditions of Mexico have thus survived the ravages of time, no such record exists for Inca Peru, despite the eight million modern speakers of modern Quechua, once the official language of the huge Inca Empire. Very few colonial documents exist in Quechua and there is nothing from before the conquest. The moral to be sought in the case of the Etruscans and the Incas is that the mind leaves no potsherds—an unrecorded language leaves no bones.
So what? Is it not just a matter of survival of the fittest? Yet with such an outcome—we all lose. In the not too distant future, our culturally homogenized ten billion descendants will have less and less to talk about as fewer and fewer languages survive and as the rich oral literature and knowledge of the natural world encoded in the smaller languages is lost. It is a race against time. Like the boulder crashing down on Indiana Jones, the behemoth of “Global Progress” is crushing the most vulnerable languages and cultures in its path.
The ethnosphere, consisting of living languages and cultures, is shrinking faster than the biosphere. We are now close to being able to clone a dodo or a dinosaur but not a language. A Jurassic Park for languages? Not even in Hollywood’s wildest imaginings!
Setting aside all other considerations, self-preservation alone should dictate the rescue of the knowledge available in endangered languages. A century ago, when the world was plagued by malaria, it was a native of the rain forest who first led us to the cinchona bark for the quinine we so desperately needed. What unknown cure for cancer, multiple sclerosis or AIDS awaits translation from an unstudied language?
Still, we do not live by bread alone. As with all colonizers around the world, those of us in the Intermountain West would do well to nurture our ties to this Shoshoni land we live in by honoring its ancient place names around the Great Basin: Tonopah, tonampaa “greasewood springs”; Tooele, tuu weta “black bear”; Oquirrh, waakkate “juniper sits”; Panguitch, painkwitsi “little fish”; and many more.
Unfortunately, the Shoshoni cultural image is among those that fare poorly due to bad press from early travelers and, subsequently, to skimpy accurate ethnographic documentation. Contrast this to the renown of the Aztecs—masters of war and civilization—versus the Shoshoni—just brutish “Diggers,” an ethnic slur applied to people like these, perceived by outsiders as barely eking out a soulless and meager living in barren wastelands. The fact was that the Numic peoples of the Great Basin over the millennia had perfected the art and science of survival in this rather harsh environment by dint of careful observation and brilliant empirical experimentation. Knowledge of their adaptation to this environment could serve us all, as we seek to accommodate our modern needs to the fragility of this ancient ecosystem. The intellectual and aesthetic attainments of the Shoshoni have gone totally undocumented.
Listen to a cultivated and urbane Aztec poet breathing in the fragrance of a blossom and breathing out poignant verses on the brevity of existence:

. . . only with flowers
can our song enrapture.
We shall have gone . . .
but our words live on . . .
We go, leaving behind
our grief, our song . . .
. . . only our song remains . . .

Given their negative stereotype, no one ever expected that level of esthetic sensitivity from the Shoshoni. All too recently, however, the first book on Shoshoni hupia or poetic song has been published. I limit myself to drastically truncated excerpts from just two of the songs. The first song captures the summer wind at play:

Wild rice, wild rice
Wild rice, swaying in the wind,
swaying in the wind.
Swaying on the green rocks at the end of the grassy meadow . . .

In the second song we see a sensitive portrayal of one of nature’s weakest creatures in the clutches of a roiling spring flood:

Little dark gosling
Little dark gosling
White wings at its sides
Fluttering . . .
White in the red water
Fluttering . . .

As we can see, the literary legacy in Shoshoni has little to envy that found in Nahuatl, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and many other languages. Yet a language is no museum piece. It is alive and ever-changing. While no written grammar, dictionary or collection of texts can capture the infinite creativity of a living language, documenting it is better than losing it. Keeping it alive by revitalizing it, when faltering, is better yet. The Northwest Shoshoni people have opted for the latter. As I have discussed above, I am with them in this effort.
Finally, the Utah College of Humanities and its Linguistics Department have made a visionary commitment to the preservation of languages threatened with extinction, especially Native American languages. As already stated, we have recruited Professor Lyle Campbell, an internationally renowned expert in Native American linguistics and language revitalization, to develop and direct a center for endangered Native American languages and cultures. This will be one of the few such centers in the world. I quote from a description of the new center by its director:

The University of Utah announces the launching of its center for endangered Native American languages and cultures. The center is dedicated: (1) to urgent and ambitious research on the languages and cultures of Native America which are threatened with loss, (2) to training of students to address scholarly and practical needs involving these languages and their communities of speakers (with training for native speakers and those whose heritage languages are endangered), and (3) to work with community members where languages and cultures are endangered towards linguistic and cultural revitalization. The center capitalizes on the current strengths of the University of Utah in Native American linguistics and the study of endangered languages, where center members have strong national and international standing. Through its grants and projects, it is also contributing significantly to community involvement in cooperation with Native American groups concerned with the maintenance and revitalization of their languages and cultures. It has developed relationships with American Indian groups, indigenous organizations, and scholars concerned with Native American endangered languages and cultures. The center fosters interdisciplinary linkages and exchange of scholars, bringing together staff and students from across the University and around the world. The center is in the process of developing a publication series and periodic conferences.

With the establishment of the center we hope to make the goals of the Book of Esther (1: 22) a credible reality:

. . . To every province according to the writing thereof, to every people after their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house and speak according to the language of his people.

WORKS CITED

Cantoni, Gina, ed. Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Flagstaff: Center for
Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona University (Monograph Series), 1996.

Crum, Beverly, Earl Crum, and Jon P. Dayley, eds. Newe Hupia: Shoshoni Poetry
Songs. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2001. [Song 19: “Song of Wild Rice,”
75; Song 49, “Song of the Child of the Wild Goose,” 146—translated by
the editors.]

Dorian, Nancy C. “Western language ideology and small-language prospects” (3-21)
in Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects. Ed.
Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1998.

Fishman, Joshua A. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical & Empirical Foundations
of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Philadelphia: Multilingual
Matters, 1991.

Hinton, Leanne, and Kenneth Hale, eds. The Green Book of Language Revitalization
in Practice: Toward a Sustainable World. San Diego: Academic Press,
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Jacobs, Kaia’titahke Annette. “A chronology of Mohawk language instruction at
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Future Prospects. Ed. Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley.
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