Endangered Languages Repression and Revival

Language and Communication ANTH 2301 Endangered Languages: Repression and Revival A Wampanoag lady who lived on a reserve on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1993 experienced an enigmatic dream that came back to her three nights in a row (Feldman 2001). She dreamed that she was in a circle of Wampanoag people singing in a language she did not know. Words from the language stayed with her when she woke up, and she was curious to know what they meant. Were these words in Wôpanâak, her forefathers' language? The Wôpanâak disappeared around the middle of the 1800s. The woman was five-time mother of five and social worker Jessie Little Doe Baird. Driven by such remarks, she started going through 1600s Wôpanâak-written letters, property deeds, and the first printed translation of the Bible in the Western Hemisphere (Sukiennik 2001). Despite being dissatisfied with her attempts to decipher the meaning of the phrases in her dreams, she became passionate about her ancestors' language and started assisting the local Wampanoag people in reclaiming Wôpanâak, their common tongue. The response from the community was quite positive. Baird attended MIT to study linguistics and obtained a master's degree because he was dedicated to the project. She created a lexicon and started teaching Wampanoag pupils to speak the language based on her analysis of Wôpanâak sources. Baird and her pupils discovered that mastering their ancestral language allowed them to unexpectedly re-establish connections with Wampanoag culture. For example, the speaker is positioned at the conclusion of the phrase rather than the beginning in Wôpanâak grammar. Wôpanâak speakers might say something like "You are seen by me," as opposed to English speakers who would say "I see you." According to Baird, this word arrangement emphasises the importance of the community over the individual and prioritises awareness of others above self. Wôpanâak also uses a different kind of reasoning when creating nouns. For example, animal names in English may convey very little or nothing about the species. The random sounds that serve as the basis for the words "cat," "mouse," and "ant" reveal nothing about their referents. However, animal names in Wôpanâak often contain syllables that describe the size, movement, and behaviour of the respective species. For example, the term "ant" has syllables that indicate that the animal moves, is not a biped, and stores objects. You are aware by now that language contains elements of culture and intellect. Different experiences of time, place, life, death, colour, emotions, and more are encoded in the languages of the globe. A language acts as a survey of the local flora, animals, geography, and climate, as well as a means of spoken documentation of the surroundings. Languages maintain cultural wisdom in the form of proverbs and tales. Epic stories and legends serve as historical records. Maintaining cultural identity may be greatly aided by language, which gives individuals a unique means of communication while also confirming their shared history and beliefs. Approximately 40% of the 7,000 languages that are still spoken today might become extinct over the next 100 years. When there are no live speakers of a language, it is deemed dead. Wôpanâak was formerly thought to be extinct. Though other linguists prefer the labels "dormant" or "sleeping," they contend that no language should ever really be deemed "dead." Language revitalization is the process of bringing a language back to life as long as written or aural records exist of it. In order to ensure that a language that has gone extinct or grown dormant has a future for future generations, community members might create strategic programmes to propagate, preserve, and modernise the language. In general, colonialism and imperialism cause languages to become endangered or inactive. Native Americans were forced to send their children to boarding schools in North America during the 1800s after being forcibly taken from their lands and placed on reservations, where they were not allowed to speak their native tongues or engage in their native customs. Similar schools were founded by foreign immigrants who had taken over territory in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii with the intention of eradicating Indigenous children's language and culture. In other contexts, slower processes of endangerment may take place when a new language provides exclusive job and trade possibilities to speakers. To take advantage of these chances, parents may urge their kids to acquire the new language, and in the process, kids could start to reject their native tongue as being outdated and reserved for the elderly. Countless languages have emerged from dormant or unconscious states, including Scots-Gaelic, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Ainu (Japan), Indigenous Australian language of Barngarla, Indigenous Māori language of New Zealand, and Native American languages of the Navaho and Blackfoot peoples. Similar to Wôpanâak, language revival is frequently sparked by active community members who see language loss as a danger to their ability to maintain their cultural identity. These concerned individuals develop initiatives to record the language and instruct both adults and children in it. They create environments in which the language is solely and regularly spoken. To create these programmes, they occasionally collaborate with linguists. Among these revitalization efforts, immersion schools and master-apprentice programmes have shown the most effectiveness. Te Kōhanga Reo, or "language nests," are full-immersion preschools that were created in the early 1980s by Māori language advocates (King 2018). Maori elders, the community's grandmothers and grandfathers, teach language and culture to very young children in these nests. The native Hawaiians, known as Pūnana Leo, have created a similar language nest programme. Research has demonstrated that children attending immersion schools perform on par with or better on standardised tests and in subsequent classrooms. Initially, some parents were concerned that their children would not acquire the prevailing national language well enough to succeed in later life. Early immersion and bilingual education later on are included in many language revival efforts (Hinton 2011, 2018). After offering immersion education for the first three years of study, the Navaho Immersion School in Arizona switches to English as the primary language of instruction until grade seven. Children get half of their instruction in Navaho and the other half in English from grades eight through twelve. One of the difficulties facing school-based revitalization initiatives is recruiting enough people who speak the language well enough to instruct students in it. The master-apprentice strategy is one of the language revitalization techniques that focuses on adult learners. The Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival established the first Master-Apprentice Language Learning Programme in California (Hinton 2018). Since then, the tactic has become widespread worldwide. In these programmes, a motivated student and an experienced speaker work together for 20 hours a week, engaging in a variety of activities using the target language together with gestures and other nonverbal cues. When done well, language revitalization may enliven communities and give people a sense of empowerment. By learning their native tongue, individuals preserve a vital channel for passing down their culture to future generations and get an understanding of its unique brilliance and complexity.