Language Revitalization

Most of us feel that we could never become extinct. The Dodo felt that way too. William Cuppy1

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William ’Will’ Cuppy, American humorist and literary critic

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Language revitalization, language revival or reversing language shift is the attempt by interested parties, including individuals, cultural or community groups, governments, or political authorities, to reverse the decline of a language. If the decline is severe, the language may be endangered, moribund, or extinct. In these cases, the goal of language revitalization is often to recover the spoken use of the language. Although the goals of language revitalization vary by community and situation, the importance of the language itself as an expression of culture, of who we are as a people, should be upheld by each individual, each family, each community, and each nation. As Fishman (1996) states ’language is the mind, spirit, and soul of a people’. The process of language revitalization is the reverse of language death. But to understand the importance, methods and need for language reviving we must first get to know the meaning of the phrases endangered language and ’language death’. An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language". Linguist Michael E. Krauss, of the Alaska Native Language Center, defines languages as safe if children will probably be speaking them in 100 years; endangered if children will probably not be speaking them in 100 years; and "moribund" if children are not speaking them now. He estimates 15-30% of languages are moribund.

Language death For as long as humans have used language to communicate, particular languages have been dying. In an important sense, obsolescence is simply part of the natural life cycle of language. At the same time, language death has taken on heightened significance in recent decades because it is occurring in epidemic proportions. According to Krauss (1992), up to 90 percent of the world's estimated 6,000 languages face possible extinction in this century, including 80 percent of the languages of North America. The factors leading to language death are non-linguistic rather than linguistic, and may involve a wide array of variables. For example, Lyle Campbell (1994) includes the following factors responsible for language death: Discrimination, repression, rapid population collapse, lack of economic opportunities, on-going industrialization, rapid economic transformation, work patterns, migrant labor, communication with outside regions, resettlement, dispersion, migration, literacy, compulsory education, official language policies, military service, marriage patterns, acculturation, cultural destruction, war, slavery, famine, epidemics, religious proselytizing, resource depletion and forced changes in subsistence patterns, lack of social cohesion, lack of physical 2

proximity among speakers, symbolism of the dominant language …, stigmatization, low prestige of the dying variety, absence of institutions that establish norms (schools, academics, texts), particular historical events, etc. Lyle Campbell and Martha C. Muntzel (1989) identify four primary types of language death, each of which has linguistic and sociolinguistic consequences: 1) Sudden language death occurs when a language abruptly disappears because its speakers die or are killed. In such cases (e.g. Tasmanian; Nicoleno, a Native American Indian language in California), the transitional phase is so abrupt that there are few if any structural consequences as the language dies. 2) Radical language death This process resembles sudden language death in terms of the abruptness of the process, but is distinguished by the shift to another language rather than the complete disappearance of the speakers of a language. In radical language death, speakers simply stop speaking the language as a matter of survival in the face of political repression and genocide. 3) Gradual language death The most common type of language death, and the one most critical for our examination of language variation here, is the case of language loss due to “the gradual shift to the dominant language in a contact situation”. In such cases, there is often a continuum of language proficiency that correlates with different generations of speakers. For example, fewer younger speakers use the dying language variety and with less proficiency in more restricted contexts than their older cohorts within the community; speakers who do not have a full range of functional or structural competency in the language have often been labeled semi-speakers, though the label obviously covers a wide range of proficiency levels. 4) Bottom-to-top language death The distinguishing feature of bottom-to-top language death is the way in which the situational contraction of language use takes place. In many cases, a dying language will be retained in more casual and informal contexts while it is not used in more formal settings. In the case of bottom-to-top language death, the language loss takes place in everyday conversation and casual settings while the language is retained in more formal, ritualistic contexts. This contraction follows the Latinate pattern where the language was used in formal ecclesiastical contexts long after it died in everyday conversation. About half the known languages of the world have vanished in the last five hundred years. Some languages of ancient empires, such as Etruscan, Sumerian, and Egyptian, disappeared centuries ago. Their inscriptions are but faint reminders of mostly forgotten 3

peoples, whose cultures and languages are long since dead. Meroitic, a language which between the eighth century BC and the fourth century AD was the official language of an empire with the same name in the Sudan, survives only in inscriptions which have not been deciphered to this day. Only three words survive of Cumbria, an ancient language of Britain. Of the many more people who left no written records we know nothing. A brief look at other parts of the world confirms the same dismal picture. Australian Aboriginal languages are dying at the rate of one or more per year. Although there may have been more than 250 languages before European contact, some linguists predict that if nothing is done, almost all Aboriginal languages will be dead soon.

Language revitalization as a global issue Over the past fifty years innovative programs have appeared, with increasing frequency, all around the world with the aim of revitalizing languages that are at risk of disappearing due to declining number of native speakers. The nature of these initiatives varies as greatly as the languages that are their targets. In some instances, they are nearly national at scope, such as the efforts to preserve Irish, yet in other instances they involve small communities or even a handful of motivated individuals. Many of these programs are connected to claims of territorial sovereignty, though cultural sovereignty or a desire to maintain a unique ethnic identity is just as often the explicit goal. Whole in one context a revitalization effort may be centered around formal education in other it may be focused on creating environments in which a language can be used on regular basis. Although tremendous variety characterizes the methods of and motives for reinvigorating languages, revitalization, as a general phenomenon, is growing and has become an issue of global proportion. There are now hundreds of endangered languages, and there are few regions of the world where one will not find at least nascent attempts at language revitalization. This comes as little surprise when considered in light of the confluence of several socio-historical factors. First, language death and moribundity (i.e. the cessation of children learning a language) are occuring at an exceptionally rapid rate. While the precise number of languages in the world is difficult to determine, and predicting the total number of languages that will cease to be spoken is harder still, there is a general concensus that at least half of the world’s 6.000-7.000 languages will disappear (or be at the verge of disappearing) in the next century. 4

Given this high rate of language death, we must recognize thata a significant proportion of communities in the world today are confronted with the loss of a language that has traditionally been an integral feature of their identity. In many such cases, efforts are being made to halt the process of language shift and to promote the usage of a heritage language.

European American and Native American issues The United States alone is a graveyard for hundreds of languages. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the area of the presentday US when Columbus arrived in 1492, only 175 are spoken today. Most, however, are barely hanging on, possibly only a generation away from extinction. A survey of the North American continent done some time ago in 1962 revealed that there were 79 American Indian languages, most of whose speakers were over 50 (for example, the Pomo and Yuki languages of California). There were 51 languages with fewer than 10 speakers, such as the Penobscot language of Maine; 35 languages had between 10 and 100 speakers. Only six languages--among them Navajo, Cherokee, and Mohawk--had more than 10,000 speakers. It is almost certain that at least 51 of these languages have all but disappeared. Languages with under 100 speakers are so close to extinction that revival for everyday use seems unlikely. The remaining native American languages in California are not being taught to children. Among the many native American languages already lost are some which gave the Pilgrims their first words for the new things they found in America, such as moose and raccoon. Our only reminders of them now are these words and state names such as Massachusetts. No doubt scores, perhaps hundreds, of tongues indigenous to this continent have vanished since 1492. Some have perished without a trace. Others survived long enough for 20th century linguists to track down their last speakers and partially describe their grammars – for example, Mohican in Wisconsin, Catawba in South Carolina, Yahi in California, Natchez in Louisiana, and Mashpi in Massachusetts. In North America only Navajo usage is increasing, and even the relatively "healthy" languages like Cherokee, spoken by 22,000 people, are threatened by low percentages of children learning the languages. It is true that in the natural course of things, languages, like everything else, sometimes die. People choose, for a variety of valid social reasons, not to teach their children their own mother tongue. In the case of American Indian languages, however, the language drop-off has been artificially induced and precipitous, and just as with the human-caused endangered

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species crisis, it is worth doing something about it. Amerindian languages were deliberately destroyed, particularly in North America. In the earlier days of European contact, Indians were separated from their linguistic kin and resettled hundreds of miles away with individuals from other tribes who couldn't understand each other. Historically, this is the single most effective way to eliminate minority languages (for obvious reasons).

Table 1: Tribal Population and Home Language Speakers, Navajo Reservation and Trust Lands (Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah ), 1980 1980

Age 5-17

%

Age 18+

%

Total

%

Population

43,121

100.0

65,933

100.0

109,054

100.0

Speak only English Speak other language

5,103

11.8

2,713

4.1

7,816

7.2

38,018

88.2

63,220

95.9

101,238

92.8

Source: Census Bureau, 1989.

Table 2: Tribal Population and Home Language Speakers, Navajo Reservation and Trust Lands (Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah ), 1990 1990

Age 5-17

%

Age 18+

%

Total

%

Population

42,994

100.0

81,301

100

124,295

100.0

Speak only English Speak other language

12,207

28.4

6,439

7.9

18,646

15.0

30,787

71.6

74,862

92.1

105,649

85.0

Source: Census Bureau, 1994.

Besides the centuries of genocide and maltreatment, Native Americans were and are facing other hazards that threat the maintenance of their languages, and thus endangering their cultural identity. Most of the speakers of the native american languages are middle-aged adults or tribal elders. The Santa Fe’s Indigenous Languages Institute reports that few languages are spoken widely by Indian children and that, without significant support toward preservation, only 20 Indigenous American languages will survive the next 60 years. But what form should preservation of an Indigenous language take, and how much hope is there that any efforts toward preservation will succeed? The answers to these questions depend on who you speak to and are as varied as the Lakota, Blackfeet, Cherokee and native Hawaiian cultures.

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U.S. language pololicies affecting Native Americans One of the main obstacles to language recuperation is that governments tend to discourage minority languages for many reasons, both pragmatic and symbolic. Pragmatically, the use of a single language makes the government’s job easier. Official documents and proceedings, education and so on are all much easier if they can be done in a single language. But once one language becomes the main language of government and commerce, people who do not speak it are automatically disenfranchised – they are less able to join the mainstream and participate in the affairs of nation. Symbolically, language is seen as a factor in unification and separation. Linguistic manorities, in this case North American Indians, see their language as a symbol of their identity; so too does a nation. A language may become the symbol of patriotism, and minority languages are therefore seen as antipatriotic, a sign of a divided nation. When the federal government placed American Indians on reservations in the late 1800s, it passed a variety of laws that severely impacted their cultures. Arguably, the most devastating was the requirement that all Indian children attend government, and later Christian, boarding schools. Here students were dressed in military uniforms, had their traditional long hair cut short and were taught all that was expected to make them “successful” in a non-Indian world. A more ’’liberal“ approach to the Native Americans was taken by the missionaries, who came from religious institutions that had little respect for Indian culture, but at least believed that the people should survive. Nevertheless, government policy toward minority, that is Native American languages is not always negative. The policies of government may also be neutral or even encouraging of the maintenance of the minority languages. What, if anything, can be done to cope with this crisis? Is it possible to rescue languages now on the brink of extinction, or perhaps even to resuscitate some that are no longer spoken? This latter idea is not so far-fetched when one considers the example of Hebrew – a "dead" language for nearly 2,000 years when it was brought back to life in modern Israel; Hebrew today has several million speakers. Some Native American groups have expressed interest in doing the same thing. Recently the Coquille tribe of Oregon sought funding for a project to revive the Miluk language, using tape recordings from the 1930s of its last living speakers. Of course, it would be hard to find a community whose language is threatened today that commands the level of resources the State of Israel devoted to the cause of reviving Hebrew. So the question of whether this kind

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of effort can succeed is very relevant. If there is little hope of preventing the extinction of a language, a revitalization project may be ill-advised; scarce funds might be better spent on other social and educational programs. On the other hand, if endangered languages can be saved, there is little time for delay in the name of budgetary constraints. In the 1980s several tribes recognized the urgency of this task. The Navajo, Tohono O'odham, Pasqua Yaqui, Northern Ute, Arapaho, and Red Lake Band of Chippewa were among those that adopted policies designed to promote the use of their ancestral tongues in reservation schools and government functions. Ironically, in most cases the English Only movement sounded the alarm bells that energized Indian leaders. While these tribal language policies were an important first step, their implementation has been uneven. To succeed, language renewal projects require not only good intentions but enormous practical efforts. Some tribes still need expert help to complete orthographies, grammar books, and dictionaries. Virtually all need assistance in developing and publishing curriculum materials. Bilingual education programs – for example, at community-run schools like Rough Rock on the Navajo reservation – are a major (if underutilized) tool for promoting native-language literacy. Another key task is teacher-training, complicated by the fact that Indian language speakers often lack academic credentials, while outsiders lack essential cultural and linguistic knowledge. As a result, these projects must draw on cultural resources available on reservations, relying especially on elders, the true experts in these languages. Tribal initiative and control are essential to the success of revitalization efforts because language choices are a matter of consensus within each community. They are very difficult to impose from without. "All-important is the peoples' will to restore their native languages," Krauss maintains, citing his experiences at the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks. "You cannot from the outside inculcate into people the will to revive or maintain their languages. That has to come from them, from themselves." If endangered languages are to be saved, it is crucial for native speakers to see the value of doing so and get actively involved in the process. To save languages, there is a need to ensure that people know why languages are nearing extinction and why are so important to their lives and to who they are. At the same time language renewal faces a perennial barrier to social progress on Indian reservations: scarce resources. Such projects must compete with other, usually more pressing priorities like health care, housing, schooling, and economic development. Most tribes, lacking a local tax base, have historically relied on federal funding for these needs. But since 1980 the federal government has cut back substantially on its support of Indian programs generally (a trend that continues under the Clinton Administration). Congress recently passed the Native American Languages Acts of 1990 and 1992, laws that, respectively, articulate a government policy of protecting indigenous languages and 8

authorize a grant program for that purpose. While some federal help was previously available through the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Department of Education, for the first time the 1992 Act made tribes eligible for funding to carry out language conservation and renewal. Yet Congress has been slow to fund the program. Finally, in the fall of 1994, the Clinton Administration awarded $1 million in grants to launch 18 language revitalization projects nationwide – a meager amount but still a beginning. Implementation of the 1990 Act has also been disappointing. Among other things, it called upon all agencies of the federal government, including the Departments of Interior, Education, and Health and Human Services, to review their activities in consultation with tribes, traditional leaders, and educators to make sure they comply with the policy of conserving Native American languages. By the fall of 1991, the President was required to report back to Congress on what was being done and to recommend further changes in law and policy. But the Bush Administration ignored these provisions, and the Clinton Administration has similarly failed to conduct the mandated review. After some prodding by the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, the matter was referred to the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), whose only response has been to compile a list of bilingual education programs in its schools (a rather short list). So, although the federal government now has a strong policy statement on file favoring the preservation of indigenous tongues, its real-world impact has thus far been limited. So the question remains: Is there a realistic chance of reversing the erosion of Native American languages? In theory, this goal is quite possible to achieve, as we know from the miraculous revival of other languages. Heroic efforts are now being made on behalf of languages with only a few elderly speakers, for example, by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. For other languages, especially those still being learned by children, taught in bilingual education programs, and receiving tribal support, there is considerable hope. In practice, however, limited progress is being made in retarding the pace of language shift overall. This bleak situation is unlikely to change without a stronger commitment at all levels and without a substantial infusion of new resources.

Bilingualism and boarding school policy

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Another of the main obstacles that slows and disables revival of the native american languages is the school system. From the late 19th century, when the first boarding schools for Indian children were established, many states took responsibility for the education of its natives. But after decades of mental and sexual abuse, boarding schools were closed. The children were sent to public schools. This was a good thing for eliminating discrimination, but Indian children became real Americans, forgeting their mother tongues. Even as recently as the 1950's, Indian children were being forcibly removed from nonEnglish-speaking households and sent to boarding schools to be "socialized." They were routinely punished there for speaking their languages, and Indian-speaking parents began hiding their languages in hopes of keeping their children in their houses or at least making school life easier for them. The percentage of Cherokee children being raised bilingually fell from 75% to 5% during the US boarding-school-policy days. Other languages, with smaller userbases and no literary tradition like Cherokee's to buoy them, have died entirely. This was not a natural death. Existing linguistic communities do not normally lose their languages after losing a war, even after being conquered and colonized, the way immigrant groups do. The usual pattern is bilingualism, which may be stably maintained indefinitely. But bilingualism does not prevent language loss. Besides, various arms and factions, the government and school systems have battled each other over bilingual education ever since its inception, weakening its effectiveness considerably. Funding and other forms of support have been diminished over the years and are constantly in danger. Of course, there are ways for perserving an Indian language in educational system. With the elementary education laws being more than less severe to Indian children, efforts are being made to restore the will of Indian children to learn the languages of their proud ancestors by encouraging them to speak among themselves and their parents and grandparents in their native language. Schools have been really trying to restore the use of native languages during class, but it seems that Indian youth has lost its interest for learning a language that they have no use of, except for personal pleasure and moral obligation. Now that the Amerindian languages of North America are in the precarious situation they are, though, simply leaving them alone will not cause their extinction trends to end. Once the majority of the young people in a community do not understand a language anymore, its usage declines rapidly. This is where language revival and language revitalization come in. Language revival is the resurrection of a "dead" language, one with no existing native speakers. Language revitalization is the rescue of a "dying" language.

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Steps in reversing language shift Joshua Fishman, an American linguist, came up with a model for reviving threatened (or dead) languages, or for making them sustainable. His model consists of an eight-stage process. Efforts should be concentrated on the earlier stages of restoration until they have been consolidated before proceeding to the later stages. The eight stages are as follows: 1) Acquisition of the language by adults, who in effect act as language apprentices (recommended where most of the remaining speakers of the language are elderly and socially isolated from other speakers of the language). 2) Create a socially integrated population of active speakers (or users) of the language (at this stage it is usually best to concentrate mainly on the spoken language rather than the written language). 3) In localities where there are a reasonable number of people habitually using the language, encourage the informal use of the language among people of all age groups and within families and bolster its daily use through the establishment of local neighbourhood institutions in which the language is encouraged, protected and (in certain contexts at least) used exclusively. 4) In areas where oral competence in the language has been achieved in all age groups encourage literacy in the language but in a way that does not depend upon assistance from (or goodwill of) the state education system. 5) Where the state permits it, and where numbers warrant, encourage the use of the language in compulsory state education. 6) Where the above stages have been achieved and consolidated, encourage the use of the language in the workplace (lower worksphere). 7) Where the above stages have been achieved and consolidated encourage the use of the language in local government services and mass media. 8) Where the above stages have been achieved and consolidated encourage use of the language in higher education, government etc. There has only been one successful instance to date of a complete language revival, creating a new generation of native speakers without even one living native speaker to help. (That instance was the reincarnation of Hebrew in modern Israel, and there were many extenuating circumstances associated with it.) However, there have been successful partial revivals where a no-longer-spoken language has been revived as a second language sufficiently for religious, cultural, and literary purposes.

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Navajo, for instance, was in steep decline until the 1940's, when the language, once deemed worthless, was used by the Navajo Code Talkers to stymie the Germans and Japanese in World War II. With Navajo's validity as a real, complex, and useful language suddenly nationally acknowledged, its usage shot up, and today this language, once on the brink of extinction, is in good health.

Factors which help an endangered language to progress David Crystal, in his book 'Language Death', proposes six factors which may help a language to progress. He postulates that an endangered language will progress if its speakers: 1) increase their prestige within the dominant community; 2) increase their wealth; 3) increase their legitimate power in the eyes of the dominant community; 4) have a strong presence in the education system; 5) can write down the language; 6) can make use of electronic technology.

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At the first mention of the language revival and revitalization, people ask: ’Why should we care?’ By the question rased some just stop at the question mark, because they think that language death is a natural course; many languages died out during the known history, so why shouldn’t we just let it be. But others engage in searching for the reasons why and why not, and try to find the right answer. Or rather answers. For we do need to preserve indigenous languages for many reasons. So why should we care if a language dies? First of all because we need diversity, then because languages express identity, they are repositories of history, they contribute to the sum of human knowledge, and finaly because languages are interesting in themselves. By inspiring the younger generations to take an interest and pride in their ancestral languages, and by providing the means for them to learn it, it is possible to reverse downward linguistic trends. The true revival of a "dead" language is something we are more reluctant to raise hopes about, but to revive such a language enough for children to have access to 12

traditional literature, to use it for cultural and religious purposes, even to speak it as a second language in limited fashion? Certainly! Kids can learn Klingon or Tolkien's Elvish if it suits them, and they can just as easily learn Miami or Siuslaw. Latin, the most famously "dead" language of all, is learned by millions of schoolchildren well enough that they can read Virgil, and is used liturgically by Catholics worldwide. It may be true that once a language is dead it is dead forever, but some kinds of dead are clearly preferable to others. If the lost languages of the Americas can all be as dead as Latin, then, well, that would be enough.

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Bibliography: 1) Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon : Multilingual Matters. 2) Fishman, J. A. (ed.) (2001). Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective. Clevedon : Multilingual Matters. 3) Hinton, L. & Locke Hale, K. (2001). The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice. Academic Press, San Diego. 4) Grenoble, L. A. & Whaley L. J. (2006). Saving languages: an introduction to language revitalization. Cambridge University Press 5) Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P., Schillin-Estes, N. (2003). The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Blackwell Publishing 6) Nettle, D. & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing Voices:The Extinction of the World's Languages. Oxford University Press 7) Crystal, D. (2000). Language Death. Cambridge University Press 8) Reyhner, J., Cantoni, G., St. Clair, R. N., Parsons-Yazzie, E. (1999). Revitalizing Indigenous Languages. Northern Arizona University 9) Bradley, D. & Bradley, M. (2002). Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance: An Active Approach. Routledge Curzon

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