California Indians gather in Berkeley to learn how to save dying languagesBy Matt O'Brien Contra Costa TimesArticle Launched: 06/13/2008 06:19:38 PM PDT
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Click photo to enlarge Leanne Hinton, professor emeritus of linguistics at U.C. Berkeley, discuss the Native American...«12345»
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BERKELEY — The first time Barbara Pineda came into contact with a linguist, she was wary about what he wanted.An academic researcher from UC Berkeley was visiting her grandmother's home in Mendocino County in the early 1960s, taking notes as her family shared words from their Northern Pomo language."I thought he came to steal it," said Pineda, who was about 8 years old at the time. "My grandmother called me over and said, 'It's OK. He's a friend.'"Pineda, 53, is now trying to salvage the endangered language that her grandmother helped document decades ago. She is one of dozens of California Indians who gathered in Berkeley from across the state this week in hopes they can learn from the university, and from each other, how to preserve languages threatened with extinction."I'm trying to find the notes on her," Pineda said. "That's what inspired me to come here. It's coming back. What they took is coming back, in a good way."
akoyako :-) on 23 May 08"> TIME Logo JULY 7, 1997 VOL. 150 NO. 1 LANGUAGE SPEAKING IN TONGUES AS TELECOMMUNICATIONS, TOURISM AND TRADE MAKE THE WORLD A SMALLER PLACE, LANGUAGES ARE DYING AT AN ALARMING RATE BY JAMES GEARY Sitting in a circle with a dozen other members of the native American Tlingit (pronounced klink-it) tribe, Jon Rowan, a 33-year-old schoolteacher, mutters in frustration: "We're babies. All we speak is baby gibberish." The group is gathered at the community center in Klawock, a town of some 800 people on the eastern fringe of Prince of Wales Island. In the Gulf of Alaska, some 40 km off the Alaskan coast, Prince of Wales Island still survives in a state of pristine natural beauty. But this idyllic stretch of land is home to at least one endangered species: the Tlingit language. Rowan and his fellow tribesmen meet every other week in sessions like this to learn their native tongue before the last fluent tribal elder dies. But as Rowan's frustration indicates, the task is made more difficult because Tlingit is becoming extinct. Forty years ago, the entire tribe was fluent in the language, a guttural tongue that relies heavily on accompanying gesture for its meaning. Now it is spoken by only a handful of people throughout southern Alaska and portions of Canada, nearly all of whom are over the age of 60. Since Tlingit was not originally a written language, Rowan and company are trying to record as much of it as possible by translating just about anything they can get their hands on into Tlingit, from Christmas carols like Jingle Bells to nursery rhymes such as Hickory Dickory Dock. The plight of Tlingit is a small page in the modern version of the Tower of Babel story--with the plot reversed. The Old Testament describes the first, mythical humans as "of one language and of one speech." They built a city on a plain with a tower whose peak reached unto heaven. God, offended by their impudence in building something to rival His own creation, punished them by shatterin