Here's another long article from the L.A. Times, this
time about the survival, even revival of minority
languages. Thought it was on topic. It's
informative,
and long. Dump it now if you're not interested.
btw, if you want the article with pictures & map,
it'll be recoverable through www.latimes.com for
a few more days ...
Genevieve
Tuesday, January 25, 2000 | Print this story
Islands of distinct languages dot the Southern
California landscape, shaping our
society. Islands of nerve cells in the brain
control how we speak. The world's
endangered languages are isolated islands ever
in peril of being overwhelmed.
This series explores how language shapes our
world and the new discoveries
that shape our understanding of language.
LAST IN A SERIES
The Impassioned Fight to Save Dying
Languages
More and more voices are speaking up to keep
them from being overwhelmed
by English and global pressures.
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Times Science Writer
HILO, HAWAII--It was not the
teachers bearing baskets of feather leis,
the fanfares played on conch shells or
the beating of the sacred sharkskin
drum that made Hulilauakea Wilson's
high school graduation so memorable.
It was this: For the first time in a
century, a child of the islands had been
educated exclusively in his native
Hawaiian language, immersed from
birth in a special way of speaking his
mind like a tropical fish steeped in the
salt waters of its nativity.
It was a language being reborn.
More than an academic rite of
passage, the graduation last May of
Wilson and four other students at the
Nawahiokalani'opu'u School on the
Big Island of Hawaii signaled a coming
of age for one of the world's most ambitious
efforts to bring an endangered
language back from the brink of extinction.
The world has become a hospice for dying
languages, which are succumbing to
the pressure of global commerce,
telecommunications, tourism, and the
inescapable influence of English. By the most
reliable estimates, more than half of
the world's 6,500 languages may be extinct by
the end of this century.
"The number of languages is plummeting,
imploding downward in an altogether
unprecedented rate, just as human population is
shooting straight upward," said
University of Alaska linguist Michael Krauss.
But scattered across the globe, many ethnic
groups are struggling to find their
own voice, even at the risk of making their
dealings with the broader world they
inhabit more fractious.
From the Hoklo and Hakka in Hong Kong to
the Euskara in Spain's Basque
country, thousands of minority languages are
clinging precariously to existence. A
few, like Hebrew and Gaelic, have been
rejuvenated as part of resurgent
nationalism. Indeed, so important is language to
political and personal
self-determination that a people's right to
speak its mind in the language of its
choice is becoming an international human right.
California once had the densest
concentration of indigenous languages in North
America. Today, almost every one of its 50 or so
surviving native languages is on
its deathbed. Indeed, the last fluent speaker of
Chumash, a family of six languages
once heard throughout Southern California and
the West, is a professional linguist
at UC Santa Barbara.
More people in California speak Mongolian
at home than speak any of the
state's most endangered indigenous languages.
"Not one of them is spoken
by
children at home," said UC
Berkeley
linguist Leanne
Hinton.
None of this happened by
accident.
All
Native American
languages, as well as Hawaiian,
were for
a century the target of
government policies designed to
eradicate them in public and in
private,
to ensure that they
were not
passed from parent to
child.
Until 1987, it was illegal to
teach
Hawaiian in the islands'
public
schools except as a
foreign
language. The language
that once claimed the highest literacy rate in
the world was banned even from the
islands' private schools.
Indeed, there may be no more powerful
testimony to the visceral importance
of language than the government's systematic
efforts to destroy all the indigenous
languages in the United States and replace them
with English.
No language in memory, except Spanish, has
sought so forcefully to colonize
the mind. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken
in the territorial United States
when Columbus made landfall in 1492, only 175
are still spoken. Of those, only
20 are being passed on to children.
In 1868, a federal commission on Indian
affairs concluded: "In the difference of
language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. .
. . Their barbarous dialect should
be blotted out and the English language
substituted." The commission reasoned
that "through sameness of language is produced
sameness of sentiment, and
thought. . . . In process of time the
differences producing trouble would have been
gradually obliterated."
Not until 1990 did the federal government
reverse its official hostility to
indigenous languages, when the Native American
Languages Act made it a policy
to preserve native tongues.
Policies against indigineous
languages were once in effect in many
developed nations. Only the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in
1991 ended that government's efforts
to force its ethnic minorities to adopt
Russian. Policies in other nations
aimed at eliminating minority
languages such as Catalan in Spain,
Kurdish in Turkey, Inuktitut in
Canada and Lardio in Australia, to
name just a few.
Silencing a language does much
more than eliminate a source of
"differences producing trouble."
A language embodies a
community of people and their way
of being. It is a unique mental
framework that gives special form to
universal human experiences.
Languages are the most complex
products of the human mind, each
differing enormously in its sounds,
structure and pattern of thought, said
UCLA anthropologist Jared
Diamond.
As a prism through which
perceptions are reflected, there is
almost no end to the variations.
In some languages, gender plays a
relatively minor role, allowing
sexually neutral forms of personal
pronouns, and in others it is so
overriding that men and women must
use completely different forms of
speech. Other tongues infuse every
phrase with the structure of
ownership, while others make
cooperation a key grammatical rule.
Some see only a category where
another sees the individuals that
constitute it.
There are languages in which
verities of time, cardinal directions,
even left and right--as English
conceives them--are almost wholly absent.
"If we ever want to understand how the
human mind works, we really want to
know all the kinds of ways that have evolved for
making sense out of the
kaleidoscope of experience," said linguist
Marianne Mithun at UC Santa Barbara.
Suffocating in Silence
More than an ocean separates Katherine
Silva Saubel on the Morongo
Reservation at the foot of the arid, wind-swept
San Gorgonio Pass near Banning
from the language renaissance underway in
Hawaii.
The silence suffocating many languages is
almost tangible in her darkened,
cinder-block living room. There, in a worn beige
recliner flanked by a fax machine,
a treadmill and a personal computer, Saubel, a
79-year-old Cahuilla Indian activist
and scholar, marshals her resistance to time and
the inroads of English.
Saubel is the last fluent speaker of her
native tongue on this reservation.
"Since my husband died," she said, "there
is no one here I can converse with."
For 50 years, this broad-shouldered
great-grandmother has worked almost
single-handedly to ensure the survival of
Cahuilla.
Her efforts
earned her a place in the
National Women's
Hall of Fame and a
certificate of
merit from the state Indian
Museum in
Sacramento. Even so, her language
is slipping away.
"I wanted to
teach the children the
language, but their
mothers wanted them to
know English. A lot
of them want the language
taught to them
now," Saubel said. "Maybe it
will revive."
If it does, it
will be a recovery based almost
solely on the
memories she has pronounced
and defined for
academic tape recorders, the
words she has filed
in the only known
dictionary of
Cahuilla, and the songs she has
helped commit to
living tribal memory. Tribal
artifacts and
memorabilia are housed in the
nearby Makli Museum
that she founded, the
first in North
America to be organized and
managed by Native
Americans.
Born on the
Los Coyotes Reservation east
of Warm Springs,
Saubel did not even see a
white person until she was 4 years old--"I
thought he was sick," she recalled--and
English had no place in her world until she was
7.
Then her mother--who spoke neither English
nor Spanish--sent her to a public
school.
She was, she recalled, the only Indian girl
in the classroom. She could not
speak English. No one tried to teach her to
speak the language, she said. Mostly,
she was ignored.
"I would speak to them in the
Indian language and they would
answer me in English. I don't
remember when I began to
understand what was being said to
me," Saubel said. "Maybe a year."
Even so, by eighth grade she
had discovered a love of learning
that led her to become the first
Indian woman to graduate from
Palm Springs High School. But
she also saw the other Indian
children taken aside at recess and
whipped if they spoke their
language in school.
In time, the child of an Indian
medicine woman became an
ethno-botanist.
For linguists as far away as
Germany and Japan, she became
both a research subject and a
collaborator. She is working now
with UC San Diego researchers to
catalog all the medicinal plants
identified in tribal lore.
"My race is dying," she said. "I
am saving the remnants of my
culture in these books.
"I am just a voice in the
wilderness all by myself," Saubel
said. "But I have made these
books as something for my
great-grandchildren. And I have
great-grandchildren."
In its broadest outlines, her life
is a refrain repeated on many
mainland reservations.
"Basically, every American
Indian language is endangered,"
said Douglas Whalen at Yale
University's Haskins Laboratory,
who is chairman of the
Endangered Languages Fund.
As a matter of policy, Native
American families often were
broken up to keep children from
learning to speak like their
parents. Indian boarding schools,
founded in the last century to
implement that policy, left
generations of Indians with no
direct connection to their language
or tribal cultures.
Today, the federal
Administration for Native
Americans dispenses about $2 million in language
grants to tribes every year.
But even the best efforts to preserve the
skeletons of grammar, vocabulary and
syntax cannot breathe life into a language that
its people have abandoned.
Still, from the Kuruk of Northern
California to the Chitimacha of Louisiana
and the Abenaki of Vermont, dozens of tribes are
trying to rekindle their
languages.
Mohawk is taught in upstate New York,
Lakota on the Oglala Sioux
reservation in South Dakota, Ute in Utah,
Choctaw in Mississippi, and Kickapoo
in Oklahoma. The Navajo Nation--with 80,000
native speakers--has its own
comprehensive, college-level training to produce
Navajo-speaking teachers for the
240 schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah
that have large numbers of
Navajo students.
Some tribes, acknowledging that too few
tribal members still speak their
language, have switched to English for official
business while trying to give
children a feel for the words and catch-phrases
of their native language.
Even when instruction falls short of
achieving fluency, it can inspire pride that,
in turn, translates into lower school dropout
rates and improved test scores,
several experts said.
Like the Hawaiian students, Mohawk children
near Montreal, who are taught
in their native language, do better academically
than their tribal schoolmates taught
in English.
But revitalization efforts often founder on
the political geography of the
reservation system, economic pressure and the
language gap that divides
grandparent from grandchild.
As many tribes assert the prerogatives of
sovereignty for the first time in
generations, some tribal leaders are jarred to
discover themselves more at ease in
English than in the language of their ancestors.
"Often people who are now
in power
in Indian communities
are the
first generation that does
not
speak the language, and it
can be
very, very hard for
them,"
Mithun at UC Santa
Barbara
said. "It is hard to be an
Indian
and not being able to
prove it
with language. You
have to
be a big person to say I
want my
kids to be more Indian
than I
am."
When people do break
through
to fluency, they tap a
hidden
wellspring of
community.
"I
was in my own language,
not just saying the words, but my own thoughts,"
said Nancy Steele of Crescent
City, an advanced apprentice in the Karuk
language.
"It is a way of being, something that has
been here for a long, long time, a sense
of balance with the world."
An All-Out Effort to Save Hawaiian
The effort to revive Hawaiian today is a
cultural battle for hearts and minds
waged with dictionaries, Internet sites,
children's books, videos, multimedia
databases and radio broadcasts. At its forefront
are a handful of parents and
educators determined to remake Hawaiian into a
language in which every aspect of
modern life--from rocket science to rap--can be
expressed.
Spearheading the revival is a nonprofit
foundation called the Aha Punano Leo,
which means the "language nest" in Hawaiian.
Inspired by the Maori of New Zealand and
the Mohawks of Canada, Punano
Leo teachers use the immersion approach, in
which only the language being
learned is used throughout the school day.
In 15 years, the Punano Leo has grown from
a few volunteers running a
preschool with 12 students to a
$5-million-a-year enterprise with 130 employees
that encompasses 11 private Hawaiian language
schools, the world's most
sophisticated native language computer network,
and millions in university
scholarships.
It works in partnership
with the state department
of education, which now
operates 16 public
Hawaiian language schools,
and the University of
Hawaii, which recently
established the first
Hawaiian language college in
Hilo.
So far, it is succeeding
most in the place where so
many other revitalization
efforts have failed: in the
homes that, all too often,
are the first place a language
begins to die.
To enroll their children
in a Punano Leo immersion
school, parents must pledge
to also become fluent in
Hawaiian and promise that
only Hawaiian will be
spoken at home.
The effort arose from the
frustration of seven
Hawaiian language teachers,
amid a general political
reawakening of Hawaiian
native rights, and one
couple's promise to an
unborn child.
The couple was
University of Hawaii
linguist William H. Wilson
and Hawaiian language expert Kauanoe Kamana, who
today is president of
Punano Leo and principal of the
Nawahiokalani'opu'u School.
The child was their son: 1999 graduating
senior Hulilauakea Wilson. Their
daughter Keli'i will graduate next year.
"When we married, my wife and I decided we
wanted to use Hawaiian when
our children were born because no one was
speaking it," William Wilson said.
"It was a personal thing for us. We were
building the schools for us, almost, as
well as for other people. We started with a
preschool and now they are in
college."
They planted the seed of a language revival
and cultivated it.
Like many others, Wilson and Kamana were
frustrated that Hawaiian could be
taught only as a foreign language, even though
it was, along with English, the
official language of a state in which the
linguistic landscape had been redrawn
repeatedly by annexation, immigration and
tourism.
It must compete with more than 16 languages
today to retain a foothold in the
island state, from Japanese and Spanish to
Tagalog and Portuguese. Hawaiian
ranks only eighth in its homeland, census
figures show, trailing Samoan in the
number of households where it can be heard.
It was not always so.
Although Hawaiian did not even acquire an
alphabet until the early 1800s, the
islanders' appetite for their language proved so
insatiable that missionary presses
produced about 150 million pages of Hawaiian
text between 1820 and 1850. At
least 150 Hawaiian-language newspapers also
thrived.
In 1880, there were 150 schools teaching in
Hawaiian. A decade later--after the
islands were forcibly annexed by the U.S.--there
were none.
As part of a small group of committed
language teachers, inspired by
influential University of Hawaii linguist Larry
Kimura, Wilson and and Kamana
vowed to restore the language to a central place
among Hawaiians.
"This is the most exciting thing I can do
for my people," Kamana said of the
foundation's mission. "This is the core of
Hawaiian identity: the Hawaiian way.
The Hawaiian language is the code of that way."
Updating Old Language With New Vocabulary
Many reviving languages, however, face the
new world of the 21st century
with a 19th century vocabulary.
"A
living language means
you have
to be able to talk
about
everything," said
Kamana.
"If you can't talk
about
everything, you will talk
in
English. It is simple."
The
task of updating
Hawaiian
falls to a group called
the
Lexicon Committee.
Once a year, the committee
issues a
bright yellow
dictionary called the Mamaka
Kaiao,
which defines new
words
created to fill gaps in
Hawaiian's knowledge of the contemporary world,
from a noun for the space
shuttle's manned maneuvering unit--ahikao ha
awe--to a term for coherent laser
light: malamalama aukahi.
This year's edition runs to 311 pages, with
4,000 terms. A is for aeolele: pogo
stick; Z is for Zimababue: a citizen of
Zimbabwe.
Whenever possible, the new words relate to
traditional vocabulary and
customs. The Hawaiian word for rap
music--Paleoleo--refers to warring factions
who would trade taunts. The word for
e-mail--Lika uila--merges words for
lightning and letter. The word for pager-- Kele'
O--echoes the idea of calling
someone's name.
Like so many other aspects of the Hawaiian
language revival--from translating
the state educational curriculum to organizing
an accredited school system--the
committee has the authority to shape the future
of Hawaiian only because its
linguists, native speakers and volunteers simply
started doing it.
"It exists; that is its authority," said
Wilson.
But many of those whose languages are
undergoing such resuscitation efforts
don't want to accommodate the present.
They worry that grafting new verbs and
nouns will violate the sanctity of the
ancient language they hope will draw them back
into a world of their own.
At Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, where the
Keresan language is spoken, the
tribal council decided in 1997 that it would not
develop a written form of the
language. The language itself was a sacred text
too closely tied to the pueblo's
religion and traditional societies to be changed
in any way.
Under the onslaught of new technology and
new customs, however, even the
most well-established languages are pushed off
balance by the natural evolution of
words and grammar.
Certainly, the 40
intellectuals of the
Academie Francaise in
Paris and the Office de
la Langue Francaise in
Quebec are fiercely
resisting the inroads of
Franglais, as a matter of
national pride and
linguistic purity.
But a thousand leaks
spring from the
linguistic dikes they
maintain with such
determination, if not
from the engineering
patter of the Internet,
then from the
international slang of
sports.
Recently, the
prestigious Pasteur
Institute in Paris started
publishing its three most
important scientific
journals in English.
Earlier this year, the
Quebec French office
felt obliged to post an
officially approved
dictionary of French
substitutes for English
golf terms.
In the same way,
many indigenous tribes
feel that their native
tongues must be made to
encompass every aspect
of a world that
continued to change long
after the language itself
stagnated.
The vocabulary of
Karuk stopped growing
naturally more than half
a century ago, said
Nancy Steele. Even the
words for auto parts
stopped with the
models of the 1930s.
As her tribe coins
words today, they
reflect the spirit of their language. The new
Karuk word for wristwatch, for
example, translates as "little sun worn on the
wrist."
"If you do not allow a language to be
spoken as a living language," Steele said,
"it will, in a sense, be a dead language. You
have to allow it to be alive and
animated."
Schools Funded by Donations, Grants
In eighth-grade science class, Hui Hui
Mossman's students are conducting
germination experiments.
Down the hall, Kaleihoku Kala'i's math
class wrestles with the arithmetic of
medians and averages. In social studies class,
Lehua Veincent taps the floor with a
yardstick for emphasis as his students recite
their family genealogies.
And Caroline Fallau is teaching her 13
11th-graders English--as a foreign
language.
So the school day hits its stride at the
Nawahiokalani'opu'u immersion high
school, where 84 teenagers, with only an
occasional adolescent yawn, are hitting
the books.
But for the sound of Hawaiian in the
hallways, computer workstations and
classrooms, this could be any well-funded
private school in America.
The appearance of prosperity is deceptive.
The Punano Leo schools are sustained year
to year by a fragile patchwork of
donations, state education aid and federal
grants. The lush, well-manicured
campus, with its complex of immaculate blue
classroom buildings, itself is the
work of parent volunteers, aided by an island
flora in which even the weeds are as
ornamental as orchids.
Several miles away, the younger children
are arriving at the public Keukaha
Elementary School, which offers both English and
Hawaiian immersion classes
under one roof.
Those in English classes walk directly to
their homerooms, while the Hawaiian
immersion students--almost half the
school--gather in nine rows on the school
steps for a morning ceremony. Chanting in their
native language, they formally
seek permission to enter and affirm their
commitment to their community.
They will not encounter English as a
subject until fifth grade, where it will be
taught one hour a day.
Running an elementary school with two
languages "is a delicate balance and not
always an easy one," said Principal Katharine
Webster. There is competition for
resources and the demand for immersion classes
increases every year, while--in a
depressed island economy--the education budget
does not, she said.
"Teaching in an immersion environment is
not easy at all," said third-grade
teacher Leimaile Bontag.
"You spend weekends and hours after school
to prepare lessons. We often
need to translate on our own, find the new
vocabulary. It takes hours and hours."
But it is a proud complaint.
Clearly, the teachers are sustained by
their love for Hawaiian and the
community it has fostered. And it appears to be
having a beneficial effect on the
native Hawaiian students, who traditionally test
at the bottom of the educational
system and have the highest dropout rate.
Given the difficulty in comparing the
language groups, an objective yardstick
of student performance is hard to come by.
But one set of Stanford Achievement Tests
taken by sixth-graders at Keukaha
Elementary educated since preschool in Hawaiian
suggests that they are doing as
well or better than their schoolmates.
In tests given in English, all of the
Hawaiian-educated students scored average
or above in math while only two-thirds of the
students in all-English classes
scored as well. In reading, two-thirds of
Hawaiian-educated students scored
average or above, compared to half of the
English-educated students.
Getting an Early Start on Hawaiian
In the shade of the African tulip trees,
Kaipua'ala Crabbe is leading 22 toddlers
in song: a lilting Hawaiian translation of
"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
Four other teachers and two university
students help the children pronounce
the Hawaiian lyrics at the Punano Leo immersion
preschool in Hilo.
Hulilauakea Wilson, who volunteers
regularly at the preschool when he is not
attending university classes, helps a little boy
tie his shoes. The child climbs onto
his lap and listens attentively, not yet sure of
the meaning of every word he hears
in school.
"Every child reacts differently," said
Alohalani Housman, who has been
teaching Hawaiian immersion classes for 13
years. "The students might listen for
months and not say anything. But all of them
soon become speakers."
And so the seeds of a language revival are
cultivated.
"It is the language of this land," young
Wilson said. "It is like growing the
native plants. This is their land. We are the
plants of this land too."
The success of the Hawaiian program raises
a larger question of longevity:
How well can such diverse languages coexist and
how much should the majority
culture do to accommodate them?
Foundation officials and parents said their
embrace of Hawaiian is no rejection
of English. They are only insisting on their
right to be bilingual, determined to
ensure that Hawaiian is their first language of
the heart.
"Everybody is so concerned about whether
they are going to learn English and
whether we are parenting them properly," said
Kau Ontai, cradling her 2-year-old
daughter Kamalei in one arm.
Her two older children attend the Punano
Leo preschool. Her husband teaches
the language. She studied it in high school,
then achieved fluency as a Punano Leo
volunteer.
Hawaiian is the voice of their home, yet
the native language they speak marks
them as alien to many in their island homeland.
"When we walk through a mall in Hawaii
speaking Hawaiian, people are
shocked," she said. "They stop us and ask: What
about English? We hear Chinese
being spoken, Japanese spoken, Filipino spoken.
Nobody ever stops them in
their tracks and says why are you speaking that?
"For now, their first and only language is
Hawaiian," she said of her children.
She is confident that they will learn
English easily enough when the time
comes.
"But my husband and I will never look into
our children's eyes and speak
English to them," she said. "That is something I
could never do."
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
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