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Fighting the Extinction of Indigenous Language

More and more voices are speaking up to keep them from being overwhelmed by English and global pressures.

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Times Science Writer

LOSING CALIFORNIA'S LANGUAGES—Of 100 Native American languages once spoken in California, 50 have been wiped out completely. An additional 17 have no fluent speakers. The remainder are spoken by only a few people. An enlarged version of the map below shows the surviving languages, the areas in which they are spoken and the number of native speakers.

HILO, HAWAII—It was not the teachers bearing baskets of feather leis, the fanfares played on conch shells or the beating of the sacred sharkskin drum that made Hulilauakea Wilson's high school graduation so memorable. It was this: For the first time in a century, a child of the islands had been educated exclusively in his native Hawaiian language, immersed from birth in a special way of speaking his mind like a tropical fish steeped in the salt waters of its nativity. It was a language being reborn.

More than an academic rite of passage, the graduation last May of Wilson and four other students at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School on the Big Island of Hawaii signaled a coming of age for one of the world's most ambitious efforts to bring an endangered language back from the brink of extinction.

The world has become a hospice for dying languages, which are succumbing to the pressure of global commerce, telecommunications, tourism, and the inescapable influence of English. By the most reliable estimates, more than half of the world's 6,500 languages may be extinct by the end of this century.

"The number of languages is plummeting, imploding downward in an altogether unprecedented rate, just as human population is shooting straight upward," said University of Alaska linguist Michael Krauss.

But scattered across the globe, many ethnic groups are struggling to find their own voice, even at the risk of making their dealings with the broader world they inhabit more fractious.

From the Hoklo and Hakka in Hong Kong to the Euskara in Spain's Basque country, thousands of minority languages are clinging precariously to existence. A few, like Hebrew and Gaelic, have been rejuvenated as part of resurgent nationalism. Indeed, so important is language to political and personal self-determination that a people's right to speak its mind in the language of its choice is becoming an international human right.

California once had the densest concentration of indigenous languages in North America. Today, almost every one of its 50 or so surviving native languages is on its deathbed. Indeed, the last fluent speaker of Chumash, a family of six languages once heard throughout Southern California and the West, is a professional linguist at UC Santa Barbara.

More people in California speak Mongolian at home than speak any of the state's most endangered indigenous languages.

"Not one of them is spoken by children at home," said UC Berkeley linguist Leanne Hinton.

None of this happened by accident. All Native American languages, as well as Hawaiian, were for a century the target of government policies designed to eradicate them in public and in private, to ensure that they were not passed from parent to child.

Until 1987, it was illegal to teach Hawaiian in the islands' public schools except as a foreign language. The language that once claimed the highest literacy rate in the world was banned even from the islands' private schools.

Indeed, there may be no more powerful testimony to the visceral importance of language than the government's systematic efforts to destroy all the indigenous languages in the United States and replace them with English.

No language in memory, except Spanish, has sought so forcefully to colonize the mind. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the territorial United States when Columbus made landfall in 1492, only 175 are still spoken. Of those, only 20 are being passed on to children.

In 1868, a federal commission on Indian affairs concluded: "In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. . . . Their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted." The commission reasoned that "through sameness of language is produced sameness of sentiment, and thought. . . . In process of time the differences producing trouble would have been gradually obliterated."

Not until 1990 did the federal government reverse its official hostility to indigenous languages, when the Native American Languages Act made it a policy to preserve native tongues.

Policies against indigineous languages were once in effect in many developed nations. Only the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended that government's efforts to force its ethnic minorities to adopt Russian. Policies in other nations aimed at eliminating minority languages such as Catalan in Spain, Kurdish in Turkey, Inuktitut in Canada and Lardio in Australia, to name just a few.

Silencing a language does much more than eliminate a source of "differences producing trouble."

A language embodies a community of people and their way of being. It is a unique mental framework that gives special form to universal human experiences. Languages are the most complex products of the human mind, each differing enormously in its sounds, structure and pattern of thought, said UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond. As a prism through which perceptions are reflected, there is almost no end to the variations.

In some languages, gender plays a relatively minor role, allowing sexually neutral forms of personal pronouns, and in others it is so overriding that men and women must use completely different forms of speech. Other tongues infuse every phrase with the structure of ownership, while others make cooperation a key grammatical rule. Some see only a category where another sees the individuals that constitute it.

There are languages in which verities of time, cardinal directions, even left and right—as English conceives them—are almost wholly absent.

"If we ever want to understand how the human mind works, we really want to know all the kinds of ways that have evolved for making sense out of the kaleidoscope of experience," said linguist Marianne Mithun at UC Santa Barbara.

Suffocating in Silence

More than an ocean separates Katherine Silva Saubel on the Morongo Reservation at the foot of the arid, wind-swept San Gorgonio Pass near Banning from the language renaissance underway in Hawaii.

The silence suffocating many languages is almost tangible in her darkened, cinder-block living room. There, in a worn beige recliner flanked by a fax machine, a treadmill and a personal computer, Saubel, a 79-year-old Cahuilla Indian activist and scholar, marshals her resistance to time and the inroads of English. Saubel is the last fluent speaker of her native tongue on this reservation.

"Since my husband died," she said, "there is no one here I can converse with." For 50 years, this broad-shouldered great-grandmother has worked almost single-handedly to ensure the survival of Cahuilla. Her efforts earned her a place in the National Women's Hall of Fame and a certificate of merit from the state Indian Museum in Sacramento. Even so, her language is slipping away.

"I wanted to teach the children the language, but their mothers wanted them to know English. A lot of them want the language taught to them now," Saubel said. "Maybe it will revive." If it does, it will be a recovery based almost solely on the memories she has pronounced and defined for academic tape recorders, the words she has filed in the only known dictionary of Cahuilla, and the songs she has helped commit to living tribal memory. Tribal artifacts and memorabilia are housed in the nearby Makli Museum that she founded, the first in North America to be organized and managed by Native Americans.

Born on the Los Coyotes Reservation east of Warm Springs, Saubel did not even see a white person until she was 4 years old—"I thought he was sick," she recalled—and English had no place in her world until she was 7. Then her mother—who spoke neither English nor Spanish—sent her to a public school.

She was, she recalled, the only Indian girl in the classroom. She could not speak English. No one tried to teach her to speak the language, she said. Mostly, she was ignored. "I would speak to them in the Indian language and they would answer me in English. I don't remember when I began to understand what was being said to me," Saubel said. "Maybe a year."

Even so, by eighth grade she had discovered a love of learning that led her to become the first Indian woman to graduate from Palm Springs High School. But she also saw the other Indian children taken aside at recess and whipped if they spoke their language in school. In time, the child of an Indian medicine woman became an ethno-botanist.

For linguists as far away as Germany and Japan, she became both a research subject and a collaborator. She is working now with UC San Diego researchers to catalog all the medicinal plants identified in tribal lore. "My race is dying," she said. "I am saving the remnants of my culture in these books." "I am just a voice in the wilderness all by myself," Saubel said. "But I have made these books as something for my great-grandchildren. And I have great-grandchildren." In its broadest outlines, her life is a refrain repeated on many mainland reservations.

"Basically, every American Indian language is endangered," said Douglas Whalen at Yale University's Haskins Laboratory, who is chairman of the Endangered Languages Fund.

As a matter of policy, Native American families often were broken up to keep children from learning to speak like their parents. Indian boarding schools, founded in the last century to implement that policy, left generations of Indians with no direct connection to their language or tribal cultures. Today, the federal Administration for Native Americans dispenses about $2 million in language grants to tribes every year.

But even the best efforts to preserve the skeletons of grammar, vocabulary and syntax cannot breathe life into a language that its people have abandoned. Still, from the Kuruk of Northern California to the Chitimacha of Louisiana and the Abenaki of Vermont, dozens of tribes are trying to rekindle their languages. Mohawk is taught in upstate New York, Lakota on the Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota, Ute in Utah, Choctaw in Mississippi, and Kickapoo in Oklahoma. The Navajo Nation—with 80,000 native speakers—has its own comprehensive, college-level training to produce Navajo-speaking teachers for the 240 schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah that have large numbers of Navajo students.

Some tribes, acknowledging that too few tribal members still speak their language, have switched to English for official business while trying to give children a feel for the words and catch-phrases of their native language. Even when instruction falls short of achieving fluency, it can inspire pride that, in turn, translates into lower school dropout rates and improved test scores, several experts said.

Like the Hawaiian students, Mohawk children near Montreal, who are taught in their native language, do better academically than their tribal schoolmates taught in English. But revitalization efforts often founder on the political geography of the reservation system, economic pressure and the language gap that divides grandparent from grandchild. As many tribes assert the prerogatives of sovereignty for the first time in generations, some tribal leaders are jarred to discover themselves more at ease in English than in the language of their ancestors.

"Often people who are now in power in Indian communities are the first generation that does not speak the language, and it can be very, very hard for them," Mithun at UC Santa Barbara said. "It is hard to be an Indian and not being able to prove it with language. You have to be a big person to say I want my kids to be more Indian than I am." When people do break through to fluency, they tap a hidden wellspring of community.

"I was in my own language, not just saying the words, but my own thoughts," said Nancy Steele of Crescent City, an advanced apprentice in the Karuk language. "It is a way of being, something that has been here for a long, long time, a sense of balance with the world."

An All-Out Effort to Save Hawaiian

The effort to revive Hawaiian today is a cultural battle for hearts and minds waged with dictionaries, Internet sites, children's books, videos, multimedia databases and radio broadcasts. At its forefront are a handful of parents and educators determined to remake Hawaiian into a language in which every aspect of modern life—from rocket science to rap—can be expressed.

Spearheading the revival is a nonprofit foundation called the Aha Punano Leo, which means the "language nest" in Hawaiian. Inspired by the Maori of New Zealand and the Mohawks of Canada, Punano Leo teachers use the immersion approach, in which only the language being learned is used throughout the school day. In 15 years, the Punano Leo has grown from a few volunteers running a preschool with 12 students to a $5-million-a-year enterprise with 130 employees that encompasses 11 private Hawaiian language schools, the world's most sophisticated native language computer network, and millions in university scholarships.

It works in partnership with the state department of education, which now operates 16 public Hawaiian language schools, and the University of Hawaii, which recently established the first Hawaiian language college in Hilo. So far, it is succeeding most in the place where so many other revitalization efforts have failed: in the homes that, all too often, are the first place a language begins to die. To enroll their children in a Punano Leo immersion school, parents must pledge to also become fluent in Hawaiian and promise that only Hawaiian will be spoken at home. The effort arose from the frustration of seven Hawaiian language teachers, amid a general political reawakening of Hawaiian native rights, and one couple's promise to an unborn child.

The couple was University of Hawaii linguist William H. Wilson and Hawaiian language expert Kauanoe Kamana, who today is president of Punano Leo and principal of the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School. The child was their son: 1999 graduating senior Hulilauakea Wilson. Their daughter Keli'i will graduate next year.

"When we married, my wife and I decided we wanted to use Hawaiian when our children were born because no one was speaking it," William Wilson said. "It was a personal thing for us. We were building the schools for us, almost, as well as for other people. We started with a preschool and now they are in college." They planted the seed of a language revival and cultivated it.

Like many others, Wilson and Kamana were frustrated that Hawaiian could be taught only as a foreign language, even though it was, along with English, the official language of a state in which the linguistic landscape had been redrawn repeatedly by annexation, immigration and tourism. It must compete with more than 16 languages today to retain a foothold in the island state, from Japanese and Spanish to Tagalog and Portuguese. Hawaiian ranks only eighth in its homeland, census figures show, trailing Samoan in the number of households where it can be heard.

It was not always so. Although Hawaiian did not even acquire an alphabet until the early 1800s, the islanders' appetite for their language proved so insatiable that missionary presses produced about 150 million pages of Hawaiian text between 1820 and 1850. At least 150 Hawaiian-language newspapers also thrived.

In 1880, there were 150 schools teaching in Hawaiian. A decade later—after the islands were forcibly annexed by the U.S.—there were none. As part of a small group of committed language teachers, inspired by influential University of Hawaii linguist Larry Kimura, Wilson and and Kamana vowed to restore the language to a central place among Hawaiians.

"This is the most exciting thing I can do for my people," Kamana said of the foundation's mission. "This is the core of Hawaiian identity: the Hawaiian way. The Hawaiian language is the code of that way."

Updating Old Language With New Vocabulary

Many reviving languages, however, face the new world of the 21st century with a 19th century vocabulary. "A living language means you have to be able to talk about everything," said Kamana. "If you can't talk about everything, you will talk in English. It is simple."

The task of updating Hawaiian falls to a group called the Lexicon Committee.

Once a year, the committee issues a bright yellow dictionary called the Mamaka Kaiao, which defines new words created to fill gaps in Hawaiian's knowledge of the contemporary world, from a noun for the space shuttle's manned maneuvering unit—ahikao ha awe—to a term for coherent laser light: malamalama aukahi. This year's edition runs to 311 pages, with 4,000 terms. A is for aeolele: pogo stick; Z is for Zimababue: a citizen of Zimbabwe.

Whenever possible, the new words relate to traditional vocabulary and customs. The Hawaiian word for rap music—Paleoleo—refers to warring factions who would trade taunts. The word for e-mail—Lika uila—merges words for lightning and letter. The word for pager— Kele' O—echoes the idea of calling someone's name.

Like so many other aspects of the Hawaiian language revival—from translating the state educational curriculum to organizing an accredited school system—the committee has the authority to shape the future of Hawaiian only because its linguists, native speakers and volunteers simply started doing it.

"It exists; that is its authority," said Wilson.

But many of those whose languages are undergoing such resuscitation efforts don't want to accommodate the present. They worry that grafting new verbs and nouns will violate the sanctity of the ancient language they hope will draw them back into a world of their own. At Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, where the Keresan language is spoken, the tribal council decided in 1997 that it would not develop a written form of the language. The language itself was a sacred text too closely tied to the pueblo's religion and traditional societies to be changed in any way.

Under the onslaught of new technology and new customs, however, even the most well-established languages are pushed off balance by the natural evolution of words and grammar. Certainly, the 40 intellectuals of the Academie Francaise in Paris and the Office de la Langue Francaise in Quebec are fiercely resisting the inroads of Franglais, as a matter of national pride and linguistic purity.

But a thousand leaks spring from the linguistic dikes they maintain with such determination, if not from the engineering patter of the Internet, then from the international slang of sports.

Recently, the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris started publishing its three most important scientific journals in English. Earlier this year, the Quebec French office felt obliged to post an officially approved dictionary of French substitutes for English golf terms.

In the same way, many indigenous tribes feel that their native tongues must be made to encompass every aspect of a world that continued to change long after the language itself stagnated.

The vocabulary of Karuk stopped growing naturally more than half a century ago, said Nancy Steele. Even the words for auto parts stopped with the models of the 1930s. As her tribe coins words today, they reflect the spirit of their language. The new Karuk word for wristwatch, for example, translates as "little sun worn on the wrist." "If you do not allow a language to be spoken as a living language," Steele said, "it will, in a sense, be a dead language. You have to allow it to be alive and animated."

Schools Funded by Donations, Grants

In eighth-grade science class, Hui Hui Mossman's students are conducting germination experiments. Down the hall, Kaleihoku Kala'i's math class wrestles with the arithmetic of medians and averages. In social studies class, Lehua Veincent taps the floor with a yardstick for emphasis as his students recite their family genealogies. And Caroline Fallau is teaching her 13 11th-graders English—as a foreign language.

So the school day hits its stride at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u immersion high school, where 84 teenagers, with only an occasional adolescent yawn, are hitting the books. But for the sound of Hawaiian in the hallways, computer workstations and classrooms, this could be any well-funded private school in America. The appearance of prosperity is deceptive.

The Punano Leo schools are sustained year to year by a fragile patchwork of donations, state education aid and federal grants. The lush, well-manicured campus, with its complex of immaculate blue classroom buildings, itself is the work of parent volunteers, aided by an island flora in which even the weeds are as ornamental as orchids.

Several miles away, the younger children are arriving at the public Keukaha Elementary School, which offers both English and Hawaiian immersion classes under one roof. Those in English classes walk directly to their homerooms, while the Hawaiian immersion students—almost half the school—gather in nine rows on the school steps for a morning ceremony. Chanting in their native language, they formally seek permission to enter and affirm their commitment to their community.

They will not encounter English as a subject until fifth grade, where it will be taught one hour a day. Running an elementary school with two languages "is a delicate balance and not always an easy one," said Principal Katharine Webster. There is competition for resources and the demand for immersion classes increases every year, while—in a depressed island economy—the education budget does not, she said.

"Teaching in an immersion environment is not easy at all," said third-grade teacher Leimaile Bontag. "You spend weekends and hours after school to prepare lessons. We often need to translate on our own, find the new vocabulary. It takes hours and hours." But it is a proud complaint. Clearly, the teachers are sustained by their love for Hawaiian and the community it has fostered. And it appears to be having a beneficial effect on the native Hawaiian students, who traditionally test at the bottom of the educational system and have the highest dropout rate.

Given the difficulty in comparing the language groups, an objective yardstick of student performance is hard to come by.

But one set of Stanford Achievement Tests taken by sixth-graders at Keukaha Elementary educated since preschool in Hawaiian suggests that they are doing as well or better than their schoolmates. In tests given in English, all of the Hawaiian-educated students scored average or above in math while only two-thirds of the students in all-English classes scored as well. In reading, two-thirds of Hawaiian-educated students scored average or above, compared to half of the English-educated students.

Getting an Early Start on Hawaiian

In the shade of the African tulip trees, Kaipua'ala Crabbe is leading 22 toddlers in song: a lilting Hawaiian translation of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Four other teachers and two university students help the children pronounce the Hawaiian lyrics at the Punano Leo immersion preschool in Hilo. Hulilauakea Wilson, who volunteers regularly at the preschool when he is not attending university classes, helps a little boy tie his shoes. The child climbs onto his lap and listens attentively, not yet sure of the meaning of every word he hears in school.

"Every child reacts differently," said Alohalani Housman, who has been teaching Hawaiian immersion classes for 13 years. "The students might listen for months and not say anything. But all of them soon become speakers." And so the seeds of a language revival are cultivated.

"It is the language of this land," young Wilson said. "It is like growing the native plants. This is their land. We are the plants of this land too." The success of the Hawaiian program raises a larger question of longevity: How well can such diverse languages coexist and how much should the majority culture do to accommodate them?

Foundation officials and parents said their embrace of Hawaiian is no rejection of English. They are only insisting on their right to be bilingual, determined to ensure that Hawaiian is their first language of the heart. "Everybody is so concerned about whether they are going to learn English and whether we are parenting them properly," said Kau Ontai, cradling her 2-year-old daughter Kamalei in one arm. Her two older children attend the Punano Leo preschool. Her husband teaches the language. She studied it in high school, then achieved fluency as a Punano Leo volunteer.

Hawaiian is the voice of their home, yet the native language they speak marks them as alien to many in their island homeland. "When we walk through a mall in Hawaii speaking Hawaiian, people are shocked," she said. "They stop us and ask: What about English? We hear Chinese being spoken, Japanese spoken, Filipino spoken. Nobody ever stops them in their tracks and says why are you speaking that?" "For now, their first and only language is Hawaiian," she said of her children. She is confident that they will learn English easily enough when the time comes.

"But my husband and I will never look into our children's eyes and speak English to them," she said. "That is something I could never do."

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times