Summer 2003

Departments

Exchange

Around the Pond

Extended Family

Great Sport

Arts

Books

Freeze-frame

Contributors

North 40

Features

Dear Master

The Vast Area of Small

Tiny couch potatoes

Pumped-up Roosters

The pervasive presence of microbes

At-risk Native Talk

Our giant in hedge funds

Feature

At-risk Native Talk

– Terry Y. Allen

Native speaker Don Stewart, a Haisla elder of Kitamaat, carves a 40-foot oceangoing canoe from red cedar, the wood most used for building big longhouses, carving and canoes. (photo by Emmon Bach) THE SOUNDS OF THE WORLD'S languages are fading away,” said linguist Peter Ladefoged. This year’s Freeman Lecturer, an honored guest of the UMass linguistics department, was speaking to a large Campus Center audience in February on the poignant topic, “The Sounds of Endangered and Other Languages.” Ladefoged, emeritus professor at UCLA, is widely known as the world’s greatest living phonetician, a father – and grandfather – figure to scores of linguists, and an indefatigable archivist of the phonetic properties of language. Someone, that is, who knows a great deal about the galloping rate of language extinction around the planet. About 7,000 languages are now spoken in the world, says Ladefoged. A century from now, if trends continue, 4,000 of those languages will have disappeared, leaving only 3,000. Currently, 48 percent of the world’s people speak 10 languages, in descending order: Chinese Mandarin, English, Spanish, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese and German. Languages die for many reasons. Among them, Ladefoged cited these: Governments find it expensive and cumbersome to provide education in more than one language. Schools and employers reward speakers of certain languages and deny rewards to non-speakers. Television, radio and film – the modern media of cultural transmission – are mostly produced in majority languages. In some parts of the world, Ladefoged said, languages are actually proliferating: central Africa, for example, and southeast Asia. But close to home, the future of native American languages appears bleak. In 1995, about 209, or roughly half of the languages in use at the time Europeans reached these shores, were still spoken, but mostly by the elderly. Of these languages, only 46 were still spoken by children – a drastic situation because the future of any language depends upon whether children, who are the future, speak and use it easily in everyday life. Why should the extinction of languages matter? Why, especially, should it matter to those who are native speakers of English – the world’s second-most spoken language, the lingua franca of global commerce, science, education, diplomacy? Four UMass scholars – three linguists and one anthropologist – are actively helping native American communities preserve their fragile languages. The scholars encountered native speakers while pursuing their own research on previously undescribed or underdescribed languages and cultures in New England, the American Southwest and western Canada. As these scholars explained, it’s no longer possible for an outsider to show up in the community, whip out the tape recorder or videocam and set about recording language. Native speakers simply won’t allow what they’ve come to see as an exploitative practice. Most North American tribal peoples make it a condition of fieldwork that the linguist actively help the community preserve its language. It is barter, an honest swap: the skills of the professional observer in exchange for entrée to the language that is the community’s precious link to its own past and future. UMass linguist Peggy Speas was introduced to Navajo as a graduate student. Over the years, she has studied the morphology and syntax of Navajo, a language of the Athabaskan family. “Your first language, your home language, has the most emotional attachments, the most emotional overtones,” Speas says. “It is the language in which you feel most yourself. To take that language away is to take away a part of a person.” In earlier generations, Speas says, many native peoples “bought into the idea that their children must speak English; that would be their ticket. But once the children began to be educated off-reservation, once they got the college scholarship. . . well, they’ve learned that this can be the ticket away from your family, and away from the values of your family. In a sense, it means giving up everything.” Anthropologist David Samuels studies the relationship between language and culture on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona. “Of course, English is very important,” he says. “That’s the realpolitik of it. But it is also possible to speak about everything in the world in a language other than English.” There are some areas of life in which only the first language, the ancestral language, will do. For example, “If traditional religious ceremonies are to continue. . . . well, they have to be done in Apache” – like Navajo, an Athabaskan language. “Sometimes the person who is singing the ceremony has to stop to explain – in English – to the people for whom he is performing what they need to do next.” Sometimes, linguists have observed, even people who don’t speak the language of their ancestors still refer to it as “my language.” These are monolingual speakers of English, but English isn’t really theirs. They feel they lack something and they sometimes talk to visiting linguists about this feeling. “This is true among Apache speakers I know,” says Samuels. “People say, ‘Can you say that in your own language?’ Response: ‘No, I don’t speak my own language.’” The destruction of native American cultures and their languages is a shameful aspect of what used to be called the Discovery of America. The Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony explicitly states that the principal aim of the colony was to “incite” native peoples to accept and to practice Christianity. Whether the motivation was the desire to proselytize or to assimilate native peoples into Western culture, says Speas, “The history of contact has involved violent efforts to wipe out language. In the case of the Navajo, until the 1950’s, children were routinely taken from their homes by force, sent away to boarding school and punished if they spoke Navajo.” The Navajo and other North American tribal communities are actively struggling with the question of how they want their languages preserved. The question is complex and often, Speas says, the community is divided about when and whether and how their children should learn the language of their forebears. Sometimes elders resist the linguist’s attempt to create a written record of what was always an oral language. Still, for today’s linguist, the task is to attend closely to the desires of the community – “to find out what the communities want to do with their language rather than prescribe for them” as was done in the past, Speas says. Some years ago Speas and colleagues formed an organization called the Navajo Language Academy, which conducts summer workshops for teachers. The academy has two goals, Speas says: “to train a generation of bilingual teachers with enough knowledge of linguistics to develop ways of teaching to prevent the extinction of the language. The other is to encourage research by native speakers and/or members of the Navajo community.” Of all North American native languages, Navajo has the most active speakers –between 100,000 and 150,000 – most living in the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and New Mexico. Two radio stations broadcast in the language. Many Navajo can read and write their native language (Christian missionaries developed a writing system in the 19th century). A thriving college on the reservation, part of a nationwide network of tribally governed colleges, trains Navajo teachers. At least eight Navajo have Ph.D.’s in linguistics or language studies and teach in universities. In the universe of fragile native languages, “Eight is a lot,” Speas asserts. Anthropologist David Samuels speaks of the radar effect of his arrival on the San Carlos Reservation. “I have no idea how word gets around that I’m there, but if I don’t see certain people, I’ll hear about it.” Samuels is interested in changes in the nature of cultural expression in a contemporary Western Apache community – especially the way speakers creatively combine English and Apache, often with humorously subversive intent. While doing fieldwork at the San Carlos Reservation, Samuels discovered a community that was deeply concerned about the fate of its ancestral language. He has received much informal tutoring. His teachers have included “the old fellow who came by the trailer where I lived to chat in Apache and the drummer in The Pacers, the band I played in, who insisted that I’d have to get used to Apache. Lots of people would stop me on the street to have a 30-second conversation that was really a sly tutorial.” Samuels has worked with teachers who are trying to introduce bilingualism and language immersion programs into the schools, and he has developed pedagogical materials. He is also annotating and interpreting historical narratives by Britton Goode, a Western Apache historian, folklorist and linguist who died more than 20 years ago. Once published, these narratives should provide more advanced language training materials than are currently available. Poignant as the situation is among the Western Apache, there is at least a community of speakers determined to revive their language. This is not the case with Massachusett – sometimes called Natick or Wampanoag – an Algonquian language that was spoken on the coast and islands of southeastern New England when Europeans arrived. Though the language and its dialect forms are virtually extinct, Emeritus Professor Roger Higgins is studying the morphology, syntax and lexicography of Massachusett. He is accomplishing this through meticulous analysis of several important documents of the early English settlers. Higgins, who retired from UMass in 2002, is a historical linguist. For over three decades, the focus of his research has been varieties of English as it has evolved over the centuries. But he has long wished to learn Massachusett. He was, he says, “astounded” to discover that linguists had not seriously studied the languages of New England’s original inhabitants. The opportunity finally came in 1998, when Higgins supervised an unusual undergraduate honors thesis by Daniel Bodah ’99 on the topic “Some Observations on the Mahican Language.” Stockbridge Mahican is an Algonquian language once spoken in western Massachusetts. Bodah was attempting to extract from an essentially unstudied 18th-century dictionary of Mahican a systematic description of the basic morphology of the extinct language. To help in this ambitious project, Higgins entered what was for him terra incognita and began studying the handful of existing works on Algonquian linguistics. The initial challenge was finding ways of making them understandable “first to myself, then to Mr. Bodah,” he says. This led Higgins to the closely-related language Massachusett. He began to recover its basic morphology and syntax using a contemporary study and a grammar by John Eliot published in Boston in 1666. Higgins and his linguistics colleague, Emmon Bach, then developed and co-taught a course on Algonquian languages using materials dating from the early colonial period. These included, among other works, Eliot’s indispensable grammar; also James Trumbell’s Natick Dictionary (1903), a vocabulary by Josiah Cotton (1708) and A Key to the Language of America by Roger Williams (1643) on the closely related Narragansett language. The course attracted considerable attention in the Five College community. This validated Higgins’ hunch that there is a lively constituency of scholars and lay persons for his further investigations into Algonquian linguistics. At his home computer, Higgins is steadily working on several fronts to make Massachusett and related languages accessible to modern users, including, he says, “descendants of the original speakers.” A mammoth project, to which he cheerfully devotes his days, is preparing a machine-readable annotated version of parts of Eliot’s translation of the Gospels and the Old Testament. When completed, this and other rare texts will be invaluable for teaching the language to modern English speakers. Higgins has made his work available to colleagues at MIT who are engaged in a language revival project. Taking a thoroughly democratic approach to linguistic research, he has been posting the retrieved texts and raw data on a publicly accessible Web site. Higgins says it’s simply the right thing to do, a beginning effort, he believes, to counter the disgraceful – he uses that word quite deliberately – neglect of Algonquian linguistics. No one would blame the seasoned linguists Higgins or Emmon Bach if they chose to rest on their laurels, but neither appears interested in doing that. Bach, who is also an emeritus professor, has taught field methods courses with speakers of Cherokee, Lakhota, Hidatsa, Central Alaskan Yup’ik and Ahousat. He continues his longtime involvement with the Haisla language community in the coastal village of Kitimaat in British Columbia. His work with the Haisla has included preparation of a new dictionary and two volumes of traditional stories and life stories; transcription of biblical and homiletic materials produced by Christian missionaries in the 1940’s; and the creation of an extensive archive of linguistic work on Haisla. He has taught mostly native American students throughout the province, in a project supported by the First Nations Programme of the University of Northern British Columbia. Bach says his knowledge of Haisla and other native languages has long informed his more general work. He is currently preparing to write two books: one on the semantics of the internal structures of words and another, more “popular” book, on the tension between “trying to do theoretical work and doing justice to linguistic diversity. Theories of language don’t always account for human linguistic creativity,” he explains. Early on, Bach got an important lesson in the ethics of linguistic fieldwork. Newly arrived in Kitimaat, he was talking to Mike Shaw, a Haisla speaker, who eventually became a good friend and an invaluable professional resource. “Mike asked why we were there. … We gave a 15-minute sketch of linguistics, talked about Universal Grammar, about figuring out what the basic structures and possibilities of human language are, about the special reasons why his language was important. “When we finished, Mike said, ‘Well, I can see all that but . . . why should we help you, what good will all that do for us?’” From this exchange Bach formulated what he has come to call Mike Shaw’s Principle: Time and resources for community-relevant research and activities should equal those devoted to community-external aims. For many fragile languages, time has already run out. Given that US and Canadian children are taught primarily in English, it is certain that their native communities will never be monolingual again, says Bach. Thus, he believes, communities may need to set realistic goals for language preservation, such as abandoning the notion of universal language acquisition while preserving the language for ritualistic purposes only. Over a decade ago, addressing a linguistics congress on “Endangered Languages and the Linguist,” Bach expressed the hope that one day centers for the study of native languages would be up and running in the United States and Canada. Native peoples, who are the true guardians of their own language, should be in charge. Until that time, he said, the “touchstone,” for all who study endangered languages, must be “empowerment.”

[top of page]

At-risk Native Talk

At-risk: Larger image