Criteria of language vitality

A classification of a language's status, from the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

  1. Absolute number of speakers
  2. Intergenerational language transmission
  3. Proportion of speakers within the total population
  4. Community members’ attitudes toward their own language
  5. Availability of materials for language education and literacy
  6. Shifts in domains of language use
  7. Response to new domains and media
  8. Type and quality of documentation
  9. Governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, including official status and use

Where do the languages you've studied fall under these criteria?
Classification of language vitality

A classification of a language's status, from the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

  1. Safe if the language is spoken by all generations. The intergenerational transmission of the language is uninterrupted.
  2. Stable yet threatened if the language is spoken in most contexts by all generations with unbroken transmission, although multilingualism in the native language and one or more dominant languages has taken over certain contexts.
  3. Vulnerable if most children or families of a particular community speak their parental language as a first language, even if only in the home.
  4. Definitely endangered if the language is no longer learned as the mother tongue or taught in the home. The youngest speakers are of the parental generation.
  5. Severely endangered if the language is spoken only by grandparents and older generations; the parental generation may still understand it but will not pass it on to their children.
  6. Critically endangered if the youngest speakers are of the great-grandparents’ generation, and the language is not used every day. These older people may only partially remember it and have no partners for communication.

Where do most Native American languages fall in this classification?
Vitality vs. endangerment

Condensed from Perley (2013), "Remembering ancestral voices".

After "safe" there are only degrees of endangerment culminating in extinction. [But] the biological metaphor has ... unintended consequences ... for language advocate/activists whose indigenous languages have been designated as extinct as well as those languages perceived as endangered.

Assessments of vitality on a graded scale are important diagnostic rubrics but I prefer to emphasize vitality as processual rather than diagnostic. I use "vitality" to evoke the activity and energy of emergent states in addition to life sustaining energy.

This shift in ontological conceptualization permits the inclusion of non-living items such as lexicons, grammars, DVDs, etc, to be afforded "energy" for sustaining language life.

How does this view potentially change our view of various languages we have considered in this class?
Survival of "small" languages

Unesco suggests several factors that may help preserve languages spoken by small numbers of speakers in a context of multilingualism.

  • Mother-tongue education
  • Agreed domains of use outside the home
  • Infrastructural support, or at least benign tolerance and respect
  • Use in media (in print, on air and online)
  • Agreed orthography

How are these potentially relevant, or different, in the context of Native American languages?
Revitalization strategies

If a language still has native speakers, they are of course invaluable in transmitting the language to future generations. Depending on the number of speakers, their age, and their training and inclinations, various approaches are possible.

  • formal teaching in schools
    • if teachers are available, students are interested, and schools are willing
  • informal teaching outside of schools
    • in tribal or other classes
    • in the home
    • with on-line resources
  • master-apprentice programs
    • structured but personal interactions
Reclamation strategies

If there are no native speakers left, but the language has been (reasonably) well documented, it can be reawakened. (Many advocates of Native languages prefer terms such as sleeping or silent, rather than dead or extinct, for languages with no native speakers.)

This requires the devoted effort of one or more people to study the existing materials, sometimes piecing together scattered notes into a coherent set of facts. Some important efforts include:

  • Wampanoag
    • Jessie Little Doe Baird teaching the language to her daughter and tribal members
  • Myaamia
    • Daryl Baldwin teaching the language to his children and tribal members
  • Lenape
    • classes and materials such as an on-line dictionary created by the Oklahoma tribe
    • separate effort by Shelley DePaul and others in Pennsylvania, partly collaborating with Swarthmore College
Breath of Life

This gathering, every two years at Berkeley since the early 90s, brings together Native people interested in learning about a language that is no longer spoken with linguists who help them interpret the information in the archives at the University. I participated in 2012 and helped with the Southeastern Pomo language.

 
Breath of Life

The activities include:

  • instruction in basic linguistic concepts, including phonetic transcription and grammar
    • with nightly homework assignments for practice
  • workshops on using archives, and visits to examine materials
  • visits to the anthropology museum and basketry collection
    • sometimes to see work by one's relatives
  • final projects to use what has been learned in a skit, speech, song, or other performance
  • advice about how to continue the work
    • preparing learning materials
    • practicing at home

Mainly participants have studied California languages, since that is the main content of the archive at Berkeley, but more recently the practice has begun in alternate years for others to gather in Washington, DC, to use the extensive archives at the Smithsonian Institution.
Chochenyo

A young man who has attended Breath of Life serves as an example of what can be accomplished. Vincent Medina taught himself to speak Chochenyo, the Native language of the East Bay (of San Francisco), one of the Ohlone or Costanoan languages. He is the first speaker since at least the 1950s.

You can read more about him here.
Yurok

The example of Yurok, in Northern California, spans the issue of having native and non-native speakers involved in the efforts. The last fluent native speaker died a year ago, but:

A recent tally by the tribe's language program indicated there are more than 300 basic Yurok speakers, 60 with intermediate skills, 37 who are advanced and 17 who are considered conversationally fluent.

Many of these speakers benefited from master/apprentice programs with native speakers while there was still time. Currently the language is taught in schools – to younger children on the reservation, as well as to any interested students at local high schools.

If these efforts continue, the Yurok language will continue to be spoken.
Videos

If there is time, we will watch this video today (produced by the Penn Museum), about language preservation, especially Tlingit.

Language: The Heart of Our Culture

It lasts about 7 minutes.