By Wilhelm K. Meya
Note: Wil Meya graduated from the Oglala Lakota College Lakota Studies Program in June 1997. After living in Pine Ridge for three years, He and his wife Heike moved to Tucson AZ where he continued his studies at the Univ. of Arizona. Wilhelm was born in Vienna, Austria and has lived in the US since 1975. He plans to obtain his PhD or Masters Degree in American Indian Studies and possibly work on the reservation in the future. Originally printed in the Oglala Sioux Tribal Vice President's newspaper "Horse Nation Hotain" in August 1998.
Introduction
A language shift from Lakota to English has been occurring among the Lakota for the past five or six generations. Though this shift has been a long time coming, only in recent years have people become aware of the extent of the language loss. It has become clear for many that there is a real danger that the language will be lost in the near future.
In the rain forests of Brazil there are said to be over 600 languages spoken by the different tribes that inhabit the Amazon River Basin . These languages are spoken nowhere else. Sometimes as few as a fifty people may speak a completely separate language. Similarly, there are tens of thousands of plant and animal species also quite limited in number and which exist nowhere else on the planet. Yet, the rain forest is shrinking. At a rate greater than 1 % a year, the rain forest is dying and thousands of species are being lost forever. In their place, come ranches and miners. A corollary effect is also occurring to the native tribes of that region. Their cultures and languages are also slowly becoming consumed by the dominant society. Sometimes in as short a time as one generation, their native languages give way to Portuguese and hundreds of thousands of years of culture is forgotten. These once proud people are domesticated into the labor pool that eventually occupies the cities and the ranches. Michael Krauss, one the world's leading experts on language loss, estimates that in this area already 160 languages or 23% of the total have become "moribund" (a language only spoken by adults and no longer being perpetuated) (Pinker 259).
He says, "The wide-scale extinction of languages is reminiscent of the current wide-scale extinction of plant and animal species. The causes overlap. Languages disappear by the destruction of the habitat of their speakers, as well as by genocide, forced assimilation and assimilatory education, demographic submersion, and bombardment by electronic media (260)."
Darwin in said to have used the difference in languages as a model for his theory of evolution. He saw languages in the same way that he saw plant and animal life forms. He observed the evolutionary process occurring in them and noted: The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that booth have been developed through a gradual process are curiously parallel.... Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears. (Darwin 106)
Michael Krauss also noted that, "language diversity is concentrated very unevenly around the world... those areas of language diversity tend to be in the same areas where biodiversity is concentrated. That is precisely where bulldozers and ethnocide are doing their work today (Krauss 3-4). The comparison between bio-diversity and language diversity is very appropriate. We are all aware that when species become extinct the potential of the planet's physical life is depleted and confined. In the same way, languages are also irreplaceable life forms that confine our human potential.
John Reyhner in his paper "Rationale and Needs for Stabilizing Indigenous Languages" states: Many of the keys to the psychological, social, and physical survival of humankind may well be held by the smaller speech communities of the world. These keys will be lost as languages and cultures die. Our languages are joint creative productions that each generation adds to. Languages contain generations of wisdom going back into antiquity. Our languages contain a significant part of the world's knowledge and wisdom. When a language is lost, much of the knowledge that language represents is also gone. Our words, our ways of saying things are different ways of being, thinking, seeing and acting (Reyhner 2).
Michael Krauss identifies four reasons why languages are important. The first is the aesthetic reason. Each language has its own beauty. The world would be a less beautiful and interesting place if we had fewer languages. Second, there is the scientific reason language diversity is important. He concludes that:
"…the knowledge of the world is embedded in every language, [it is something] which we cannot afford to lose. Languages contain traditional wisdom, for example of medical plants; which tree has bark that may prevent cancer; but the name of that tree is about to become extinct. Diversity also includes the fact that each language has a different way of seeing the world in its grammar. The death of any language diminishes our ability to think in different ways" (Krauss 4).
He continues by saying that there is a third an ethical argument for preventing language loss. And he is disturbed by the fact that there is little opposition to the fact that we seem to be allowing "survival of the fittest" to prevail over human rights. He feels that even though as human beings we are also supposed to be endowed with reason and ability to control our impulses and plan rationally for the future, this is not occurring. Finally he says that just as we are beginning to recognize the world, the biosphere we live in, as a web of life, our lack of concern for indigenous languages implies that we have now reached some new Babal-like pinnacle of wisdom that allows us to make this unilateral and irrevocable decision to let ninety some percent of our languages go (4).
The anthropologist Russel Bernard said: "Linguistic diversity ... is at least the correlate of (though not the cause of) diversity of adaptational ideas; ideas about transferring property (or even the idea of property itself), curing illness, acquiring food, raising children, distributing power, or settling disputes. By this reasoning, any reduction of language diversity diminishes the adaptational strength of our species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw. We know that the reduction of bio-diversity today threatens all of us. I think we are conducting an experiment to see what will happen to humanity if we eliminate "cultural species" in the world. This is a reckless experiment. If we don't like the way it turns out, there's no going back" (Bernard 82).
Perhaps the most influential person in the effort to reverse language shift, is Dr. Joshua Fishman. His lifelong study of language has provided many people, new to language stabilization, with a deeper understanding of the implications of language loss. He states: The most important relationship between language and culture that gets to the heart of what is lost when you lose a language is that most of the culture is in the language and is expressed in the language. Take it away from the culture, and you take away its greetings, its curses, its praises, its laws, its literature, its songs, its riddles, its proverbs, its cures, its wisdom, its prayers. The culture could not be expressed and handed on in any other way. What would be left? When you are talking about the language, most of what you are talking about is the culture. That is, you are losing all those things that essentially are the way of life, the way of thought, the way of valuing, and the human reality that you are talking about.
There is another deeper relationship between language and culture, the symbolic relationship. That is, the language stands for that whole culture. It represents it in the minds of speakers and the minds of the outsiders. It just stands for it and sums it up for them the whole economy, religion, health care system, philosophy, all of that together is represented by the language (Fishman, What do You Lose 2). Andrew Woodfield, the director of the Center for Theories of language and Learning, makes the frightening suggestion that, "The richness and complexity of Nature outstrips our understanding. Language is both a cultural product and a natural phenomenon...[And we as] human beings do not yet know all the ways in which linguistic diversity is important." (Woodfield 4).
Native American scholars and educators have been trying to reveal more about the relationship between language and culture. In his 1994 thesis, Richard Little Bear (Cheyenne) points out that there has been a precipitous decline in the use of Cheyenne among people under 25. Interviews with 18 Northern Cheyenne Elders indicate that this has implications for the survival of traditional culture, since they feel that English cannot adequately convey Cheyenne values (Little Bear).
This is also the sentiment that numerous Lakota elders express in Pine Ridge: "Lakota Language expresses the relationship of everything that exists and how everything is part of the whole with the Great Spirit"--Birgil Kills Straight; "Without language you have no culture."--Gerald One Feather; "The language tells all of what is Lakota" -- Marie Randall (Hunter 1)
Most Lakota speakers feel there is a deeper understanding of the Lakota worldview that can only be had through being a native speaker. This feeling was attempted to be elucidated by what is called the linguistic determinism hypothesis postulated by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir noted that speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different aspects of reality simply to put words together into grammatical sentences. Whorf wrote: We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory ; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees (Pinker 59).
When I asked a respected Lakota elder, "Do you have to speak Lakota to think Lakota?" Zack Bear Shield said that you must first have the thought before you can express it with words. To me this meant that language and thought are dependent on each other in the way traditionally thought, although not exclusive of one another. Even so, there are also real differences between two languages like English and Lakota that suggest that language does play a role in creating differences of perception. Some of the significant differences between English and Lakota include:
1. English is primarily an "isolating" language which builds sentences by rearranging immutable word sized units like: Dog bites man and Man bites dog. (Pinker 232) Lakota, on the other hand, is a language that is both an "inflecting" (altering the form of the word to indicate different grammatical and syntactic relations) and "agglutinating"( joining different parts of words together to compound meaning). It expresses who did what to whom by modifying nouns with case affixes and or by modifying the verb with affixes that agree with its role playing in number, gender and person. For example:
Inflexive noun: Micinca - my child (Buechel 29)
Agglutinating noun: mniskaumni - water obtained from melting snow (339)
Inflexive verb: Oci'ciyakapi - I tell to you ( 49-50) or Am'ap'e - He hit me. (Karol 94)
Agglutinating verb: Wawaciyaotain - I make things manifest for one (Buechel 43)
2. In both English and Lakota, adverbs play an important role. Adverbs are a part of speech that modify a verb, adjective or other adverb. Adverbs tell when, where, how, and why things happened. In English, most adverbs are formed by adding "-ly" to the adjective such as: quickly, sadly, easily, and courageously. Adverbs' descriptive ability in English is limited mostly to the list a adjectives.
Use of adverbs in Lakota is much more extensive and their construction is more inclusive of other parts of speech. Buechel writes, "their use in Lakota is complicated by their large variety, their euphonic variations, and their lack of English equivalents except by way of circumlocution. (26)" Some common adverbs are :kakiya - toward yonder place; iyeceh'ci - in exactly the same (38) Endings include: -han, -ka, -kab, -ke, -ki,(ci), -kel, -l, -la, -na, -otan, -pa, -kiya, sniyan, -s'e, -ta, -ata, -tu, -wapa, -ya(n), -yakel, -yankel, -yela, -tan, -tanhan (24) Adverb use in Lakota represents a whole new dimension of description and allows for more precise explanations of when, where, how, and why. This is particularly true when the adverb is constructed from a verb, and has the effect of doubling a verb when it modifies another verb (Ending are usually -ya and -kel in this case.) A theoretical construction could be something like " He prayed blessingly."
3. Though there may be subtle differences in the way male and female English speakers use language, Lakota makes full use of "gender deixis" especially in formal speech. This difference in male and female language usage is represented most commonly by a declarative participle at the end of the sentence. For men: -yelo, -lo, -welo. For women: -we, -ye, -yele (46)* For further detail see, "The Pragmatic Functions of Gender Deixis in Lakhota" by Sara Trechter, U. of Kansas.
4. Perhaps one of the most important differences is that English is a "subject prominent" language in which all sentences must have a subject (even if there is nothing for the subject to refer to, as in, "it 's cold" or "There is none.") Lakota is a "topic prominent" language, like Japanese. This difference is related to perception differences by the fact that English is more cause and effect in structure, similar to the scientific method. And Lakota, through being topic prominent, refers to things as simply being without implying any one thing is a particular cause. This is a subtle distinction. And is made evident by the fact that in Lakota there are often sentences which may not even have a clear subject as in, "Sni yelo" instead of "It is cold" (What is cold?... " It".) Now an English speaker has to find how "It" is making it cold. This may be the kind of circular reasoning that influenced the development of scientific inquiry. Even sentences with "subjects" are structured with the topic introducing the thought as in: Mato Paha ekta eyayelo. (He went to Bear Butte.) or Bill Clinton wowakiyaka wacin. (I wish to speak to Bill Clinton.) or Nitakoja kin toketu hwo? (How is your grandchild?) This topic prominent way of speaking is often apparent in a native Lakota speaker's English as in the sentence: "Things that are said are backwards." whereas a native English speaker would say, "You say things backwards."
5. English is a "Subject-Verb-Object" (SVO) language as in, Dog bites man. (Pinker 232) Lakota, on the other hand, Lakota is primarily a "Subject-Object-Verb" (SOV) language, though it has different constructions depending on usage. It is clearly SOV when the subject and object are (named) nouns as in: God made the earth. "Wakantanka maka kin kage." or The dogs found a bone. "Sunka kin hohu wan eyeyapelo." However, when the subject is not a named noun (like God or Dogs) only the conjugated verb form is used to indicate the subject. This makes Lakota seem Object- Verb oriented. In English a personal pronoun (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) would be used. Though Lakota has personal pronouns, the forms of the conjugated verb most often indicate the subject. The sentence is consolidated and no words are wasted. Ex: I am looking for your grandfather. Nitunkasila owale. Here Lakota also displays its topic prominent (object) form. In the case where the object is a personal pronoun (me, you, him, us, you, them), the pronoun is usually incorporated into another word, most often the verb. Ex: Grandfather hears you. "Tunkasila nanih'un. When both subjective and objective pronouns are used in their "inseparate" forms, they are both incorporated into the word, usually the verb. Ex: He hears you. Nanih'un. Thus the Lakota language aims to maintain absolute clarity through a systemized simplification process that offers efficient and unique thought expression. On a side note, Old English used to be largely an OSV language like Lakota. Modern examples of this archaic form are seen in such sentences as: With this ring I thee wed. (Pinker 240)
Clearly there are many differences between Lakota and English, enough to occupy linguists for hundreds of years if they chose to pursue it. However, the sad fact is that there is only very small likelihood that Lakota would last even that long. The status of the Lakota language needs to be made clear to those who can play a role in either its death or life. Here are some general figures from an informal survey done in 1993-94 by the Oglala Lakota College, Graduate Program .
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with a population estimated near 20,000 the majority are non-Lakota speakers: (Lone Hill 1)
Of the 40 % of the population (est. 8,000) from above with limited and fluent speaking abilities; they break down into the following demographic profile:
Age (Years Old) Percent Lakota speakers
0 to 5 1%
6 to 10 1%
11 to 18 1%
19 to 30 10 %
31 to 40 20 % {Average minimum age of speaker is 35}
41 to 50 40 % }
51 to 60 50 % }
61 to 70 80 % } LAST POTENTIAL TEACHERS
71- to 80 90 % }
81 and over 90 % } (Lone Hill 1)
As one can tell from the above statistics the majority of the speakers are above the age of 35 with few or any speakers below this age. This is indicative of a discontinuation of the inter-generational transmission of Lakota and it appears that few people, if any, have transmitted the language to their children in the last thirty years. When linguists see a language spoken only by adults, they know it is doomed. (Pinker 259) And they classify such a language as "moribund." However, not all is lost. According to Census statistics 40% of the population of Pine Ridge is under the age of 18. This massive demographic shift could lead to new ideas and new will to save the language and the culture.
Fishman suggests that, "sometimes it is easier with the grandchildren than with the children. The grandchildren, at least, do not have the guilt experience of having chucked the language themselves. (Fishman, Maintaining, 5) In all likelihood, however, the current generation under thirty-five may never become Lakota speakers, even under the best of circumstances. If the Lakota Nation started today with a reservation-wide, full, 100% immersion in the schools, offices, Bureaus, stores etc. The best that can be expected is to have that child that is born today to be part of a new generation of speakers that would begin to start repassing down the language in 20 -30 years. However, the current and last crop of speakers (those over 35) will have to teach the language for the next 30 years because there will be no one to replace them. Given current trends all of us know or are one of the last speakers (certainly the last generation of speakers) of the Lakota language. Unfortunately there continues to be a great deal of denial and lack of awareness about the status and cultural importance of the language. There is, however, no denying the fact that the language is in the middle of dying and now is the last half-realistic opportunity to attempt what is being called the "reversing of language shift" or the "stabilizing indigenous languages." Michael Krauss says denial represents," the most important barrier that impedes the stabilization, revival, and maintenance of our languages. (Krauss 5)"
The Lakota might think that they are one of the few people who have to worry about losing their language. This is not so. There are millions upon millions of people around the world that are working for their language on all continents (Fishman, What, 3). There used to be over 300 languages spoken in North America. Today, liberal estimates place that number at around 210. Linguist Michael Krauss estimates that 160 languages (not including minor dialects) are still spoken in the United States. However, 89% of the indigenous languages in the United States are moribund. He classifies them as follows:
Total Indigenous Languages in U.S.: 160 ENDANGERED.
Category A:
Language still being learned by children from their parents and elders in the traditional way. Number left: 20
Percent : 11 %MORIBUND:
Category B: Languages still spoken by the parental generation, who could theoretically turn around and start speaking their native language instead of English to their children but generally they do not. Number Left: 30
Percent: 17 %
Category C: Languages spoken by the middle-aged or grandparental generation and up only. (i.e. Lakota) Number Left: 70
Percent : 40 %
Category D: (Nearly extinct) Languages spoken only by a few of the very oldest people. These elders often do not have the chance to talk much to each other. The language may be completely out of use, or it may be only remembered by at least one or two people in their eighties, so not quite extinct.
Number Left: 40
Percent: 32 % (Krauss 1)
Lakota is 20-30 years from Category : D
Though the situation may look grim for native languages in North America, they only represent about 3% of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Krauss estimates that by the year 2000, between twenty and fifty percent of those languages will be Category B: (moribund) or worse. And he questions how much longer the remaining languages will still be spoken in the future. Basically, 90% of the world's languages may become extinct in the next hundred years.
WORLD LANGUAGE STATUS:
SAFE: 5-10 %
ENDANGERED: 40-75 %
MORIBUND: 20-50 % (Krauss 3)
That means that the only languages that will survive will be the ones most of us recognize ( i.e. English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic and a hundred or so others). Every other languages and cultures would be assimilated and lost forever. Imagine if in the next hundred years we lost 90 % of our animal species. We would only be left with cows, sheep and other domesticated animals and handful "wild" animals held in large game preserves. Or if we lost 90% of our plant species. I suppose that this is what they are referring to when they talk about, "The New World Order." Russel Bernard writes, "If the natural world survives the next few centuries, much will be owed to the insights and the perspectives of American Indians and other indigenous groups. Unfortunately, the Indian communities that have survived until now may be extinct by then. (Reyhner 2)"
For languages hovering on the verge of extinction perhaps the only and best thing to be done is to compile a serious archive collection. Fishman states, "we certainly hope that we are not there", but the better part of caution is to start working on that because part of it is going, even if part of it is staying. So the sooner and more completely this is done, the better. (Fishman, Maintaining, 3)"
Is this a realistic assessment for the Lakota language? I personally hope not. However, according to the 1993 O.L.C. survey, the feeling on Pine Ridge is split between those who feel it is important and those who feel it is either unimportant or are ambivalent. (Lone Hill 2) Fishman notes that it is occasionally said that languages do not die, they commit suicide. He has observed that sometimes this is true, "Some of them begin to do it far before they have any need to. Some of them do it towards the end. Sometimes they may say they wish there was a younger generation that knew the language, but they do not really do anything about it. (Fishman, Maintaining, 5)" Barbara Burnaby, also notes, in her review of language maintenance literature, that under these circumstances, "one can expect highly polarized rhetoric, and contradictions between rhetoric and actual behavior in the language communities in question. (Burnaby 2)"
If it is too late ideologically and culturally, a new modus vivendi is often been worked out. People begin saying, "well, we can be, whatever, Chippewa, Seneca, Lakota, whatever, we can be it in English" Fishman states that the cultures go on and they work out a new relationship between language and culture, but the language is detachable and dislocated, and it becomes very difficult to bring back and strengthen the old language. (Fishman , What, 5) Under these circumstances, the Lakota culture will become about as Lakota as someone from Minnesota is Swedish or Norwegian. The revival and preservation of minority languages, however, is not a hopeless cause. Successful efforts towards indigenous language renewal and maintenance are to be found around the world. The most famous example is the revival and re-vernacularization of Hebrew in Israel. It had not been spoken in two thousand years and was societally revived from the written record. A century ago the first few native speakers were raised. Since it was not spoken in so long new terms needed to be created out of old words. Words that could be used for every day talking situations; words for work like carpentry and for school like kindergarten. These were the kind of words that adults and teachers needed everyday who were going to be the first children to be given that language very early. Since most of the parents did not speak it, the children were entrusted to the teachers who had learned to speak it. Children did not live with their parents. They lived in the children's home with the few teachers who had forced themselves to learn how to speak it, not naturally but fluently. The kibbutz , which means "gathering " in Hebrew, is a collective farm or settlement of which there are hundreds in Israel. They continue to form the social backbone of the country. The Israeli success in "reviving Hebrew" is a social miracle, but it was not done without trial and commitment. They had the will to do it. They also approached the problem by aiming where the mother-tongue starts, that is children. They did not concentrate along institutional lines, but along the informal and spontaneous ways in which a real language lives. Children live; they play; they laugh; they argue; they jump; they want; they scream. One of the founders of the revitalization of Hebrew was a man called , Eliezer Ben Yehuda. He felt that if the Jews were to return to Palestine then they would need "a common language to provide themselves an identity." The Orthodox Jews and those who knew the language best were opposed to its revival in the vernacular and tried to counteract his efforts. He persevered, however, and today there are millions of speakers and Hebrew can be considered a "safe" language (Fishman, What, 7).
Other examples of language revitalization include French in Quebec, Catalan in Spain, and Welsh in Great Britain. Many of these efforts have been have been on going for at least most of this century and for all of them the struggle is far from over. The Irish began their effort to save the language 75 years ago. In that time they have gone from a time when five percent of the Irish population was Irish mother-tongue to a time when three percent is Irish mother-tongue. After trying everything that your are likely to think of. But, by this time, two-thirds of the population understands Irish, which was not the case in that earlier time. Two-thirds of it have been strongly influenced by what the revivalists did, even though few of them actually speak the language. Irish would be in even worse condition had the revivalists not done all they did. (Fishman , Maintaining, 9) All-Irish , Mainly-Irish, and Partly- Irish Schools were established. They also tried to create a social space where the language would be used. They have voluntary neighborhoods in which all community services and community informal life is in Irish. They are involved in constant out reach efforts through clubs, camps, vacations spots, and teams all geared toward the appreciation and understanding of the Irish language. (Fishman, What, 8)
There are also many places where language revival efforts are in full swing. The Basques , in Spain; the Bretons, in France. Among Indigenous people, the Maoris of New Zealand started a model revitalization campaign in 1982 called Kohanga Reo or "Language Nests." In the early 1970's the Maori recognized that their language was close to extinction and if the Maori language was to survive it was up to the Native New Zealanders to revive the language. The people took it upon themselves to deem the language a political objective. In 1982 a University class started an experimental language teaching method called Kohanga Reo. These students, who did not speak the language, put their small children with grandparents to learn the language. The children would be totally immersed in the language. These methods proved successful and many Kohanga Reos were started (Hinter 30).
The Department of Maori Affairs (New Zealand's B.I.A.) became involved in the later part of 1982 and created three objectives for language revitalization:
1. Arrest the decline of Maori-speaking people in New Zealand by bridging the gap between the bulk of Maori speakers who are over 40 with the new generation aged 0 to 5 years, the foundation of the future.
2. Give Maori people greater control over their own lives and reinstate the ability to plan and organize their own future within the context of the extended family system.
3. Reinstate Maori control over Maori resources. There are now an estimated 600 preschool/ Kindergartens that are engaging in a full immersion curriculum using the Kohanga Reo techniques.
In this setting all non-Maori speaking children are taken care of on a daily basis by Maori-speaking elders. James MacPherson in his 1991 report to the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,Tradition and education:towards a vision of our future, states that the Language Nests and Community language preschools of the Maori represent the best development and potential in Aboriginal Language and culture maintenance among English speaking countries (Burnaby 8).
Another native language revitalization effort that is receiving a great deal of attention is the 'Aha Punana Leo immersion program in Hawai'i. before the U.S. takeover of Hawai'i in 1896, Native Hawaiians had a flourishing culture and a literate Hawaiian population. The language was being taught in the schools as well as being perpetuated in the communities. After the invasion, use of Hawaiian was banned. In the 1980's it became apparent that the language was on the verge of extinction. Virtually, no one under the age of seventy could still speak Hawaiian, except the residents of a one small privately owned island, Ni'ihau. These residents numbered around 200, including about thirty Hawaiian speaking children. The rest of the 200,000 Native Hawaiians are approaching Category: D level.(Krauss 2) The 1990 census listed only 8,872 speakers of Hawaiian. Since 1983 there has been, however, a a coordinated community and state government effort to save the Hawaiian language and culture from extinction through establishing schools taught in Hawaiian; serving those who wish to continue to use or revive the language in their homes. In 1983'Aha Punana Leo began organizing schools from the preschool to University level. They currently serve approximately 175 children in nine Punana Lei preschools in the State and develop materials and teachers for them. Children continue their education by attending Hawaiian Immersion Public Schools elementary through High School. Children are educated entirely in Hawaiian until the fifth grade where English language arts is introduced as a subject -- often taught through Hawaiian. English continues to be taught for one hour a day through High School. The initial children are currently in the eleventh grade and the entire program serves well over a thousand children.
A long range study of the program has shown academic achievement equal to, or above that, of Native Hawaiian children enrolled in the State's typical English medium programs, even in the area of English language arts. Problems include finding and developing teachers and materials and assisting a public school administration that does not know Hawaiian and has institutionalized barriers to enrollment and development i the schools . Strengths are strong interest in revitalizing Hawaiian in the Community, strong parental leadership, and cooperative work with the Punana Leo preschools, the State Office of Hawaiian Affairs , and the University of Hawaii system. The University system also has been instrumental in the effort to revitalize Hawaiian. Through out the entire system of higher education in Hawaii there is approximately 2,300 students enrolled in some form of Hawaiian language. The University of Hawaii, graduates more than 120 majors annually from its Hawaiian Studies Program, which is taught in Hawaiian. They have established a Masters program in Hawaiian language and Literature and have a teacher certification program for teachers planning to teach in these public schools through the medium of Hawaiian . The University develops curriculum for all the immersion schools including math and science texts. The Hawaiian language center , produces a newspaper and two computer services in Hawaiian . And a lexicon committee is responsible for coining new terms and disseminating them to the public. Though the Hawaiian language is still in grave danger there have been significant steps made in its stabilization. There have never been as many families actively using Hawaiian in the home in the last fifty years. The revivalists claim that much of the progress in Hawai'i has been made by insisting that policies and laws reflect the desire of the Hawaiian people and that the Hawaiian language be a living language for Hawaiians today. (Kauanoe)
In the continental Unites States the most active language revitalization programs are occurring in Alaska and the Southwest. In Alaska one of the largest school districts, the Lower Kuskokwim School District, has begun fully immersed Kindergartens in Yup'ik and has begun to develop more curriculum material in Yup'ik for its long existent bilingual program paying a great deal of attention to providing culturally appropriate material. Since most of the students entering the school are Yup'ik speakers, they concentrate on keeping it the first language and then begin making the transition to English between the third and sixth grade (Williams).
In the southwest, the Navajo are making the transition to an English language dominant environment. And the school districts are now reversing their previous assimilatory policies in the face a drastic reduction in the number of Navajo speakers entering the school system due to the language shift. In Kayenta, Fort Defiance, and Tuba City Public Schools they have now instituted full immersion Kindergartens and and make a full transition to English by the third grade for the voluntary students in each district who enroll in the program. There is concern among the parents that time spent in Navajo activities will hinder English academic development. However, Arizona State measurements indicate that English Academic scores have improved. Like wise, parental involvement is increasing and the awareness of the fundamental issues related to language shifts increasing throughout the community. (McLean 2)
Other immersion programs have also recently been launched in the Northwest Territories in Canada , by the Hualalapi in Arizona, the Mohawks in Canada , in American Samoa, on the Blackfoot Reservation in Browning, Montana by Dr. Darrell Kipp , as well as many others. Linguists estimate that it takes , around six years on average, to become fully, that is academically-competent in a second language and internationally, researchers have found that bilingualism is an asset rather than a handicap (Reyhner 3). Whether any of these immersion programs will have any long term effect remains to be seen. Language stabilization and revitalization is still a relatively new field. Fishman says, "reversing language shift is a research field, it is an applied field, it is a cultural values field, it has new horizons, there are new things to do, things that are differently focused than the ordinary school has been. (Fishman, What, 8). For example, the children in the Hawaiian immersion program acquire fluency in Hawaiian in a natural way, by interacting with Hawaiian speaking teachers and schoolmates. Instruction is full-day and the school year is eleven months long. To further strengthen the program, parents and other family members attend weekly language classes . This enables the whole family to participate in the language experience. Other programs require that the parents attend the school if the child is to be admitted to the school. The parents learn everything that the child learns and they can go home and talk about the same things that the teacher was talking about and do so in the language of the teacher. In the Navajo program each student is interviewed for approximately one hour during which time the program is explained and questioned answered and parents are required to sign a letter of commitment.
Reversing language shift cannot be done on a purely institutional basis. Inter-generational mother-tongue transmission has to be the goal of any language revitalization effort. Krauss states, "Children learn to swim in the water, not in a classroom. One could even get a Ph.D. in swimming and write a book about it , then jump in the water and drown. Anybody who has had four years of high school French and then goes to Paris has probably had a similar experience. The academic approach has it own value, but it does not, by itself, produce a vital living language." (Krauss 4) Fishman says , "Creating community is the hardest part of stabilizing a language... There are family building, there are culture building, and there are intimacy building prerequisites for language fostering." (Fishman, What, 8) Reversing language shift is community building in the way that Hebrew was resurrected and re-vernacularized. Re-vernacularization is harder than either language learning or language teaching. Vernaculars are acquired in infancy, in the family, which means in intimacy. Fishman says, "Vernacularization is the opposite of institutionalization. Revernacularization requires not only inter-generational language transmission, but societal change."(Fishman, Maintaining, 6)
If it is determined that the Lakota language community has the commitment and will to pursue language stabilization it can benefit from the revitalization experiences that have occurred to others through out the world. Each level of social organization from the Nation to the family must organize and work in tandem towards the same goal, Lakota language stabilization and revernacularization:
1. The Nation. In all the case mentioned above, the languages all had a large potential speaker population generally over 200,000. To save Lakota, the Oglalas cannot stand alone. In order to establish a viable speaker base of at least 100,000, Lakota must organize their population on and off the reservation. A Lakota Language Revitalization Task Force using the Native American Language Act (NALA) of 1990 and 1992 must be organized to administer the efforts from top to bottom. In most cases this organization, though a grass roots in principle, is driven by the Universities, as in the case of New Zealand or Hawaii. Tribal and State Colleges and Universities must form a coalition that can work more effectively. It makes no sense if Black Hills State University, Oglala Lakota College, Sinte Gleska University, Sitting Bull College, Cheyenne River Community College, Sisseton Wahpeton Community College, University of South Dakota, and the University of Colorado, Boulder all pursue diverging paths in Lakota Language maintenance. There needs to be a standardized orthography, a lexicon committee, and a great deal of effective curriculum development. There has been some progress in this area. New words have been coined by Lakota Scholars like Ed Starr and Sidney Keith in their new Lakota-English Dictionaries. This is a start on the long road of Lakota language revitalization.
2. The State: State government played important roles in assisting an financing the revitalization effort. Even though many of the governments had a hand in the languages downfall, it is essential to ensure their cooperation in its revitalization. The State of South Dakota must be lobbied by this coalition to make Lakota an official State Language and to create a department to coordinate a language revitalization effort with the tribes and the Task force. This cooperation with the state is evidenced in Hawaii, New Zealand, Israel, Ireland, and many others. One of the benefits of this allows immersion programs to hire teachers solely based on the fluency of the language, and it does not affect financing. The State must face its history and take responsibility by actively supporting Lakota language revitalization.
3. The Tribe: The tribe can do more to support the National and Community efforts. It must strengthen its endorsement of the Lakota language through words and actions. The Ute tribal resolution, for example, requires Ute language instruction in preschool through twelfth grade (Reyhner 8). The tribe could set a date , like 2015, to require that all tribal business be done in Lakota. It could change the road signs and publish a Lakota Newspaper. It could make bilingualism a requirement for employment and require businesses and other entities to actively pursue bilingual policies. Educating the tribe about effects of dominant society television is among things that can be done as well.
4. The Community: Whether it is called a kibbutz, a language nest , or a tiospaye a program needs to be outlined using these proven techniques for language revitalization. Communities and Tiospayes must be recreated to focus on language and culture. This will require a great deal of commitment and hard work. The tiospaye is the only solution and the only way language nests can be instituted . The tribe and the BIA must actively assist the traditional headmen in setting these organizations up so that they can become viable cultural, lingual, and economical entities. Schools must be organized in these communities that reflect these ideals. Elders and speakers must be mobilized for creating an immersion environment within these communities. The full utilization of the elders as in New Zealand .
5. The Family: The family is the heart of this rescue effort. If you speak Lakota start speaking it today with your children if you have grandchildren speak to them only in Lakota, make it a priority in your life. Because that is just the minimum of what it will take to save the language. No generation has the right to disregard a language that has been painstakingly handed down for thousands of generations. Your family must also become part of a language community. You must enroll your children in a full immersion program and start speaking and or learning it if you don't know the language. If you do not make a full lifelong effort to use the language your are forsaking your ancestors and killing the language. The Lakota language shift is occurring everyday. Everyday that no action is taken means one step closer to a very real extinction. People must remember that the language is the soul of the people.; the language is the mind of the people; and the language is the spirit of the people. Krauss writes that, "any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism. (Pinker 260)"
I wish to end with a song of encouragement for the Lakota in the long road ahead:
Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who are caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - Dylan Thomas.
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