And his feelings about the high school have shifted. But the 16-year-old (a second cousin to Yurok teacher James Gensaw) now is teaching his mom. He came into McQuillen’s class three years ago knowing only 10 words of Yurok: It wasn’t spoken in his home. It seems to be working.Īlex Gensaw lives next door to tribal elder Archie Thompson and craved a deeper connection to his culture. The tribe has pushed for high school classes to be scheduled in the early morning - to get students there and keep them there. The key to success for Yurok is teaching children the language that perhaps their parents forgot, says the LATimes: For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers-“informants,” in the lingo-is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language’s last days. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, “ Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”)īut Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it the original “writing on the wall,” presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Linguists are working furiously to preserve the language that Jesus spoke, Smithsonian reports:Īramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. There are currently 141 languages that qualify as extinct or “sleeping.” Aramaic isn’t on that list, but it’s close. The Endangered Language Project is creating an online database of research and information about languages that are imperiled. Many linguists are trying to preserve these languages as they totter along towards extinction. This has occurred throughout human history, but the rate of language disappearance has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Depending on attitudes toward the ancestral language, those children or their children may never learn the smaller language, or they may forget it as it falls out of use. These trends explain, for instance, why more language diversity exists in Bolivia than on the entire European continent, which has a long history of large states and imperial powers.Īs big languages spread, children whose parents speak a small language often grow up learning the dominant language. This occurs through official language policies or through the allure that the high prestige of speaking an imperial language can bring. Throughout human history, the languages of powerful groups have spread while the languages of smaller cultures have become extinct. Keeping small languages vibrant has always been a big challenge, says National Geographic: That might seem like a small group, but in the 1990s, there were just six Yurok speakers left. Last fall, Eureka High became the fifth and largest school in Northern California to launch a Yurok-language program, marking the latest victory in a Native American language revitalization program widely lauded as the most successful in the state.Īt last count, there were more than 300 basic Yurok speakers, 60 with intermediate skills, 37 who are advanced and 17 who are considered conversationally fluent. But the people who provide life support for the struggling tongues can look to one success story: Yurok. And saving a dying language is really hard. For native speakers of Navajo, Southwestern Ojibwa, Ohlone or Aragonese, losing their language means losing cultural heritage and history. By the year 2100, the human race will have lost about half of the languages in use today.
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