American Magazine April 2014

TSESUNGUN
Pictured:
Señor Anselmo Nuyado
Ancapichun and Señora
Teresa Maripan at the
sacred site Shuka Kura
(House of Rock)
Where:
Choroy Traiguen, Chile
Speakers:
fewer than 10
From the dictionary:
[ko] water
YOKOIM
Pictured:
Luis Kolisi on the
Karawari River,
modeling traditional
body paint for tourists
Where:
Papua New Guinea
Speakers:
1,000
From the dictionary:
[japakupan] hello
YOKOIM: PHOTO BY CHRIS RAINIER, ENDURING VOICES PROJECT
useful word for yak herders is dönggür (doong-GUR), meaning male
domesticated, uncastrated, rideable reindeer in its third year and first
mating season, but not ready for mating.
“You have to be out in the landscape interacting with the animals
and the features of the landscape to even understand the grammar
of a language,” says Harrison, who first recognized his knack for
language during a trip to Poland as an AU undergrad. “Language is so
much more than something contained in the head. It spills out into
the environment and the world around us. That was my big eureka
moment: that the academic discipline of linguistics was too narrow
to apprehend the language.”
LANGUAGE SHIFT
Linguists do not know exactly how or why languages die. They
seem to diminish in strength and eventually disappear for many
reasons—social, economic, and political—but almost always from
outside pressure.
Children appear to hold the key to keeping a language alive, says
AU linguist in residence Robin Barr, who teaches in AU’s Department
of World Languages and Culture. “The more people you can get in a
speech community who are using the language and using it with their
children . . . so they learn not only the grammar and the pronunciation
but also all of the culturally important lexical items,” the better the
chance that the language will flourish the way healthy languages do.
The classroom, past and present, has played a role in language
vitality. The elderly Guenteo sisters from Chiloe Island lament that
their community schools teach classes mostly in Spanish. In the United
States, past policies of cultural assimilation drove many Native American
children to government-run boarding schools, which prohibited them
from speaking their languages. In western Mongolia today, young
nomadic herders face similar pressures in schools, where they must
speak the dominant Mongolian language.
Indigenous languages fade for other reasons. Young speakers might
come to view them as out of date, socially inferior, or an obstacle to
employment. Or they might opt to learn to read and write in a dominant
language and not keep up the oral tradition of their native tongue.
When children understand a small tongue spoken at home but
refuse to speak it themselves, a shift to a dominant language occurs.
Their children, the next generation, miss the chance to learn to speak
it fluently, if at all.
Language shifts also happen in global languages—when, say, huge
numbers of young Spanish speakers migrate to America with their
parents and cast aside their native tongue for English in order to fit in
or keep up with their English-speaking peers. Despite this shift, the
Spanish language remains strong, because so many people, including
children, still speak it around the world.
Harrison, who was born on a Cree Indian reservation to missionary
parents, has become a fervent advocate of cultural autonomy for
indigenous groups. Speakers of endangered languages, he says, are
often given a false choice that has dire consequences: either learn a
dominant language and leave behind their ancestral tongue or not
learn it and risk social, political, or economic hardship.
Around the world, however, multilingual speakers prove that people
can be afforded another choice: to become fluent in another language,
or languages, while holding on to their heritage tongue.
LET’S TALK #AMERICANMAG 19