This is the first of 2 items from earlier this year that have to do with languages outside of Africa, but which may be of interest. This one is about Native Americans in Canada trying to revitalize their languages. It is from the Canadian paper, Globe & Mail.
Language crusaders revitalize dying tongues As Canada's native dialects slide toward obsolescence, aboriginal groups are finding resourceful ways to ensure linguistic posterity PATRICK WHITE >From Wednesday's Globe and Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080115.Lcensuslanguages0116/BNStory/lifeMain/home January 16, 2008 at 4:36 AM EST For a brief time when he was 6, Chief Robert Joseph's schoolteachers rendered him mute. If he dared speak Kwak'wala, his only tongue, even to complain of t'sit'saxsisala (sore feet) or t'ixwa ( a cough), the missionaries at St. Michael's Residential School in Alert Bay, B.C., would strike. Related Articles And if Mr. Joseph's friends mustered the audacity to ask him yalkawa'mas did you get hurt? they risked a smack themselves. "I certainly saw my share of rulers, straps and cuffs on the ear," Mr. Joseph says in perfect English, the language forced upon him 62 years ago. "You had to pick up English or not communicate at all." Others students had it worse. One common punishment involved a sewing needle through the tongue. The last native residential schools closed in 1996, but the silencing of native tongues continues. Tuesday, Statistics Canada released data showing nearly all of Canada's native languages sliding toward obsolescence as fluent elders die and young aboriginals grow up speaking only English or French. In new data culled from the 2006 census, 21.5 per cent of aboriginals reported speaking their ancestral tongue fluently, down from 24 per cent in 2001 and 29 per cent in 1996. Some languages Haida, Tlingit and Maliseet among them lost one-third of their mother-tongue speakers over the first half of the 21st century. Others are down to just one fluent speaker. But there are optimistic storylines tucked within those bleak numbers. Among the country's population of first nations all aboriginals who are not Inuit or Métis those who said they can converse in an aboriginal language held steady at 29 per cent between 2001 and 2006. And the number of conversant young aboriginals living on reserves increased 1 per cent. That reversal, however slight, is due in part to language crusaders working to revitalize dying tongues and even revive dead ones. In small pockets across the country, aboriginal groups are striking up immersion programs, recording fluent elders and uploading phrases to the Web to ensure linguistic posterity. One of the most ambitious of those projects is FirstVoices, a B.C.-based online archive that hosts aural dictionaries, phrase books, songs, stories and interactive language games for more than 60 languages, some based as far away as California. For $2,500, FirstVoices provides communities with digital recording equipment to upload their language online. "I realized that we were at a moment in human history where, in the blink of an eye, the last speakers of a range of languages were passing away every day," says Peter Brand, one of its creators. For Mr. Brand's co-creator, John Elliott, it was more personal. His late father, Dave, spent the last 20 years of his life typing out Sencoten the language of Vancouver Island's Saanich people words and phrases, even inventing an entire Sencoten (pronounced Sen-chaw-then) alphabet that was less cumbersome than anything university linguists had taught him. When he died in 1985, Dave Elliott left his son several binders full of typed and handwritten pages, much of which is now catalogued at FirstVoices. Every child at Lauwelnew Tribal School, just outside Victoria, now takes a Sencoten class every day and the community has become home to dozens of young, semi-fluent speakers. Four of the 20 or so elders fluent in Sencoten died around Christmas, but their voices will live on in students graduating this spring. "They will not be fluent, but at least they have a grasp," says Linda Elliott, John's sister, who also teaches Sencoten. To reinforce the use of Sencoten, many of the local street signs, bus schedules and park markers incorporate the endangered language. Other aboriginal groups in British Columbia have used FirstVoices to buoy school immersion programs. Farther east, one aboriginal group is leaning on FirstVoices to bring back its language, extinct for more than a century. Four hundred years ago, roughly 35,000 people living between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay spoke Huron. By the 20th century, however, the French language and diseases had silenced it. Fortunately, Jesuit missionaries kept copious lexicons of Huron words and phrases. And now members of the Huron-Wendat nation, with help from a $1-million grant and Laval University, are working on dictionaries and course materials with the goal of creating an entire school curriculum. "We know it will never be a first language," says Isabelle Picard, who's heading up the program. "We're aiming for Huron as a second language." Why bother, then, if the language can never come back fully? "When you are a native without language, you are without culture," Ms. Picard says. "The way that Huron words are built, we can actually learn what our ancestors were thinking." Linda Elliott offers her students much the same explanation, but with an example. She tells them that the word celanen the total body of knowledge passed down to young people has no English equivalent. "Within language, there is a whole world view," Ms. Elliott says. "When we don't pass that on to our children, our young people get lost and society breaks down." To the skeptics who doubt them, Canada's language crusaders point to Welsh, Hebrew and Yiddish all languages that were revitalized over the past century through intensive education programs. "We can take heart from those examples," Mr. Brant says. "The least our generation can do is give future generations a chance to access their language." But they could use more help. In 2003, the federal government promised $172-million over 10 years to preserve aboriginal languages, a pledge the Conservatives clawed back in November, 2006. "I was surprised there wasn't more of an uproar about it," says Chief Joseph, who still worries about the fate of Kwak'wala despite growing interest among the young people of northern Vancouver Island. He recently had a dream in which he was standing alone on a desolate beach. "There was nobody left to talk to," Mr. Joseph says, "so I started babbling to myself. I hope it means nothing." © Copyright 2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. 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