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"> 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

Field-worker and eminent linguistic theoretician speaks out on years of experience with dying languages in the jungles of Brazil. From Threatened Languages toThreatened Lives * Daniel L. Everett, Research Professor * Department of Linguistics * University of Manchester There are about 6,800 mutually unintelligible languages spoken in the world today. Many languages spoken in the past have ceased to exist and many languages not yet 'born' will come into being in the future. Since the beginning of Homo sapiens, new languages have been constantly emerging while others vanish forever. This is why many linguists say that the total number of actual languages spoken in the world at a given moment of human history is but an small fragment of the perhaps infinitely large total number of possible human languages. It might seem as though the death of one language is not a particularly serious event but, in fact, each loss is a terrible tragedy. A language is a repository of the riches of highly specialised cultural experiences. When a language is lost, all of us lose the knowledge contained in that language's words and grammar, knowledge that can never be recovered if the language has not been studied or recorded. Not all of this knowledge is of immediate practical benefit, of course, but all of it is vital in teaching us different ways of thinking about life, of approaching our day-to-day existence on planet earth. In my 25 years of field research on languages of the Brazilian Amazon, I have had the privilege of living for more than six years in villages of the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) and other groups, such as the Banawá (ba-na-WA). . . . as the last seventy remaining Banawá speakers gradually switch to Portuguese. The Banawás, for example, are members of a select group of Amazonian Indians that make curare, a fast-acting and deadly strychnine-based poison used on blowgun darts and arrows. The ability to make this poison is the result of centuries of knowledge

One Native Life Email this page Print this page Posted: July 11, 2007 by: Richard Wagamese Learning Ojibway I was 24 when the first Ojibway word rolled off my tongue. It felt all round and rolling, not like the spikey sound of English with all those hard-edged consonants. When I said it aloud, I felt like I'd really, truly spoken for the first time in my life. I was a toddler when I was removed from my family and if I spoke Ojibway at all then, it was baby talk and the language never had a chance to sit in me and grow. English became my prime language and even though I developed an ease and facility with it, there was always something lacking. It never really quite felt real, valid even. It was like a hazy memory that never quite reaches clarity and leaves you puzzled whenever it arises. When that first Ojibway word floated out from between my teeth, I understood. You see, that first word opened the door to my culture. When I spoke it, I stepped over the threshold into an entirely new way of understanding myself and my place in the world. Until then I had been almost like a guest in my own life, standing around waiting for someone or something to explain things for me. That one word made me an inhabitant. It was peendigaen. Come in. Peendigaen, spoken with an outstretched hand and a rolling of the wrist. Beckoning. Come in. Welcome. This is where you belong. I had never encountered an English word that had that resonance - one that could change things so completely. It was awkward at first. There's a softness to the language that's off-putting when you first begin to speak it. It's almost as if timelessness had a vocabulary. With each enunciation the word gained strength, clarity and I got the feeling that I was speaking a language that had existed for longer than any the world has known. This one had never been adapted to become other languages like English had evolved from Germanic tongues. Instead, the feeling of Ojibway in my throat was permanence. I

Preface Richard E. Littlebear Our Native American languages have been oral since time immemorial. Some of them have been written only in the last three centuries. We must remember this oral tradition when we teach our languages. We sometimes negate this oral tradition by blindly following the only model for language teaching we know: the way we were taught the English language with its heavy emphasis on grammar. Teaching our languages as if they had no oral tradition is one factor which contributes to the failures of our Native American language teaching programs so that we now have what amounts to a tradition of failure. Probably because of this tradition of failure, we latch onto anything that looks as though it will preserve our languages. As a result, we now have a litany of what we have viewed as the one item that will save our languages. This one item is usually quickly replaced by another. For instance, some of us said, "Let's get our languages into written form" and we did and still our Native American languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's make dictionaries for our languages" and we did and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's get linguists trained in our own languages" and we did, and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's train our own people who speak our languages to become linguists" and we did and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's apply for a federal bilingual education grant" and we did and got a grant and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's let the schools teach the languages" and we did, and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's develop culturally-relevant materials" and we did and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's use language masters to teach our languages" and we did, and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's tape-record the elders speaking our languages" and we did and still our languages ke

Technology helps tribe pass on native speech By Ann Marie Bush The Capital-Journal Published Wednesday, March 05, 2008 POTAWATOMI RESERVATION - Cecelia "Meeks" Jackson is helping revitalize an almost lost language. Jackson, 85, is one of six people nationwide who fluently speak the Potawatomi language, Sydney Van Zile, director of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Language Center, said Tuesday. Print E-mail Comment Anthony S. Bush / The Capital-Journal Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation elder Cecelia "Meeks" Jackson works with Laverne Haag on recording translations from English to Potawatomi for the Phraselator on Tuesday. The Phraselator is a one-way communication translator being used by the Prairie Band Pottawatomi Nation to record and teach its language, which is spoken fluently by only six people. PRAIRIE BAND POTAWATOMI NATION The Potawatomi are very protective of their language. However, they did share three greetings: Bosho: Hello Bosho Nikan: Hello, friend Nitte na kin: How are you? Source: Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation Thanks to advanced technology, Jackson is sharing her knowledge with other members of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation through the Phraselator Language Companion, a one-way translator. "We are in a highly critical state now," Van Zile said of the language. "Life happens. There are things that replace it." The Phraselator Language Companion was invented by the U.S. military to communicate with Iraqis in the war on terror, said Don Thornton, president of Thornton Media Inc., based in Banning, Calif. After Thornton read about the technology, he contacted the defense contractor, Voxtec, for the right to use the technology for native language revitalization. He was denied, but continued on his quest. Three years ago, he received approval, and today the company works with more than 75 tribes and tribal organizations in the United States and Canada. The Phraselator is a handheld tool that allows a user to instantly translate spoken Englis

Researchers are fighting against time to save decades of data on the world's endangered languages from ending on the digital scrap heap. Extract from a dictionary Preserving languages for future generations Computer scientist and linguist Professor Steven Bird of Melbourne University says most computer files, documents and original digital recordings created more than 10 years ago are now virtually irretrievable. Linguists are worried because they have been enthusiastic digital pioneers. Attracted by ever smaller, lighter equipment and vastly improved storage capacity, field researchers have graduated from handwritten notes and wire recordings to laptops, mini-discs, DAT tape and MP3. "We are sitting between the onset of the digital era and the mass extinction of the world's languages," said Prof Bird. "The window of opportunity is small and shutting fast." Languages disappearing "The problem is we are unable to ensure the digital storage lasts for more than five to 10 years because of problems with new media formats, new binary data formats used by software applications and the possibility that magnetic storage just simply degrades over time," said Professor Bird. When you record material in MP3 format now, what will happen in five years' time when a new format comes along? Prof Peter Austin, University of London There are a number of initiatives across the world to ensure that endangered languages are saved for future generations. "Linguists estimate that if we don't do anything, half of the world's languages will disappear in the next 100 years," said Professor Peter Austin of the School of Oriental and Africa Studies at the University of London. "There are currently about 6,500 languages in the world, so that's 3,000 languages completely going, lost forever," he told the BBC programme Go Digital. Professor Bird is involved in the Open Language Archive Community (OLAC), an attempt to create a international network of internet-based digital archives, u

Military device holds key to saving Oneida language Jennifer O'Brien Sun Media November 28, 2007 The problem is, Oneida children don't speak Oneida -- haven't for three generations -- say leaders from the area First Nation. TRANSLATES: The hand-held Phraselator seems like a gadget out of the original Star Trek. Load an SD card with the appropriate language software, speak an English phrase into the unit and it immediately translates. (KEN WIGHTMAN/Sun Media) EXCITING: Verland Cornelius, 78, right, spoke Oneida when she was a young girl and today she is part of an effort to save the language for future generations. With Cornelius at the training session in the use of the new language-protecting equipment are, from left, Olive Elm,, Darelyn Doxtator, Mary Elijah who is director of the Oneida Language Cultural Centre, and Bonita Abram, all members of the Oneida Nation. (KEN WIGHTMAN/Sun Media) But suddenly, thanks to a military tool, the Oneida of the Thames community has found a way to tap into a solution for its dying language. One that was there all along. Some of the 2,000-strong community's eldest -- only 90 still speak fluent Oneida -- spent yesterday recording phrases in their native language onto machines called Phraselators. "This is going to revitalize our language before it dies," said Mary Elijah, director of Oneida Language and Cultural Centre, gesturing to one of eight hand-held devices recently bought by the settlement. "This (Phraselator) is going to outlive everybody." And not a moment too soon, she said, adding the youngest Oneida speaker is 50 years old, and most are over 70. Created for the U.S. military, the Phraselator LC allows the user to translate English words into any native language. It's used by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Don Thornton, who has distribution rights to deliver the device to native settlements across Canada and the U.S. Thornton, who is Cherokee and originally from Oklahoma, lobbied the U.S. Army for

"Voices of the World": Language is the House of Being Somewhere between six and seven thousand languages are spoken in the world. But half of the world's languages will disappear within the next 100 years. In average a language vanishes every two weeks, Janus Billeskov Jansen and Signe Byrge Sørensen stress. They co-directed "In Languages We Live"and "The Importance of Being - MLABRI"as part of the "Voices of the World"project. By Lars Movin Published in FILM #60, November 2007 "The Importance of Being Mlabri - Voices of the World". Photo: Jørgen Schytte Signe Byrge Sørensen, Janus Billeskov Jansen. Directors. Photo: P. Wessel A new language has emerged among young people in Nairobi's Kibera ghetto - Sheng, a portmanteau of Swahili, English and other local languages. Young people speak Sheng, they sing and rap in Sheng and they use it when they don't want their parents to know what they are saying. Sheng is a rapidly evolving language, with new words being added every day. A language is a living organism, it is consciousness and identity. Languages come and go, but Sheng is an exception. Most of the world's languages are vanishing. Very few new ones emerge. Take Australia. When Europeans arrived, Australia had 250 languages - 700 counting dialects. Today, just 70 remain. These examples are taken from the film "In Languages We Live" (2005), an homage to linguistic diversity and a warning of how much we stand to lose if the current trend continues. A linguistics researcher who appears in the film has studied 12 different indigenous Australian languages over the last 30 years. Today, they are all gone. A big chunk of the world's cultural heritage has been lost. Forever. Co-directed by Janus Billeskov Jansen and Signe Byrge Sørensen, "In Languages We Live" and its sequel, "The Importance of Being - MLABRI" (2007), make up the "Voices of the World" anthology. The two films were conceived together, the first presenting a global perspecti