Bringing Our Languages Home: Language Revitalization for Families

By Leanne Hinton

Throughout the world individuals in the intimacy of their homes innovate, improvise, and struggle daily to pass on endangered languages to their children. Elaina Albers of Northern California holds a tape recorder up to her womb so her baby can hear old songs in Karuk. The Baldwin family of Montana put labels all over their house marked with the Miami words for common objects and activities, to keep the vocabulary present and fresh. In Massachusetts, at the birth of their first daughter, Jesse Little Doe Baird and her husband convince the obstetrician and nurses to remain silent so that the first words their baby hears in this world are Wampanoag.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597142236

Leanne Hinton

Leanne Hinton is professor emerita of linguistics at UC Berkeley, and she has worked closely with many Native communities on language learning and research, particularly in California. She is a founding member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival and its biennial Breath of Life workshop. For her advocacy she has received numerous honors, including a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation and an Honored One Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Her previous books include How to Keep Your Language Alive (2002), Bringing Our Languages Home (as editor, 2013), and The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (as coauthor, 2018).

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lives.

INTRODUCTION

Leanne Hinton

Deep in a misty mountain range in Northern California, a young family is visiting with elderly relatives who are members of the last generation to grow up speaking the Karuk language as their first and primary language. The elders are chuckling over the children of the family, who understand and speak Karuk as much as their parents are able to teach them. "teexúriha hum? (are you hungry?), Violet asks. hãa! (yes!), answers Machnátach, three years old. Violet then asks, fâat ivishtáanti? (what do you want to eat?). He answers moosh! (meaning mush," spoken with a true Karuk accent) and all the elders laugh in delight. These are the first Karuk children in three generations to grow up having their language spoken to them at home from infancy—indeed, since before their births, when their mother laid a tape recorder over her womb every night to play tapes of Karuk stories to them.

On the other coast, in Massachusetts, a mother and her five-year-old daughter are walking through the aisles of a grocery store, picking out items for the week’s meals. "Tyâqas wah nutahtôm? (What can I have?), the child asks, and her mother answers, Wah kutahtôm wutâhumuneash (You can have some strawberries). Other shoppers walking by, strangers to the family, may hear this snippet of conversation and have no idea what language they are listening to. Depending on their ideologies or their moods of the moment, they may think, How sweet to hear a five-year-old talking a foreign language or perhaps, Darned immigrants! Why don’t they learn English?" What they probably do not know is that this mother, a native speaker of English, has devoted many years of her life to learning this profoundly American language, Wampanoag—and that this child is the first one to be raised as a native speaker of Wampanoag in close to two hundred years.

These small scenes between parent and child can be viewed against the backdrop of deep time. In our first hundred thousand years of human history, our species has spread across the planet in multiple waves. People have adapted in ingenious ways to the tremendous variety of environments they have come to, and we have created a vast array of cultures, each with its own customs, rituals, belief systems, and forms of artistic expression—and each with its own language. Language is one of the great adaptations of the human species. It allows members of a group to communicate with each other in great detail and to express and create great verbal art; and it is also a self-identifying mechanism that allows groups to differentiate from each other and take their thinking in different directions. The wonderful plasticity of the human brain allows people to become multilingual, able to communicate across groups. And so languages and cultures also interact with each other, influence each other, and form new synergies and even new languages.

But it is of course not always the case that contact between cultures is benign and mutually beneficial. The pattern we see all around us in today’s world is the massive development of a global economy and technology backed by centuries of military might steamrolling over ecosystems and the human cultures that had been part of them. Over and over again we have seen the marginalization, enslavement, or even genocide of groups of people who were the stewards of their land before the arrival of political, economic, or military imperial forces. This vast military-industrial complex has threatened the very diversity of adaptation that is the hallmark of the human species.

Language is one of the casualties of this process. Groups of indigenous people and long-term minorities are dispossessed of their land and livelihood, and may be scattered into diaspora or forced into missions or reservations or cities belonging to the new order and characterized by other languages. Governments and the majority groups they represent want to impose their own language on the developing nations; they see other languages as a threat to their hegemony. School systems (such as the early twentieth-century boarding schools for indigenous peoples of the US and Canada) are sometimes founded with specific aims to teach the dominant language and eradicate the other endemic languages within the nation’s borders. In another tragic twentieth-century case of forced cultural and linguistic assimilation, that of the stolen generation of Australian aborigines, mixed-blood children were taken away from their parents. All these oppressive policies have led to worldwide erosion of the languages spoken by indigenous and minority populations. Of close to 7,000 languages that are still spoken in the world, most are spoken by fewer and fewer people each decade, and hundreds have lost their last speakers in our own lifetimes. At least 250 languages have gone extinct since 1950, and UNESCO estimates that almost half of the languages of the world for which there is sufficient data to know their status are in danger of extinction.¹

But there is also another pattern emerging in the current era, of individuals and communities striving to strengthen or regain aspects of their heritage cultures even within the context of the larger, newer society. Such efforts are often part of a backlash against the encroaching society, a movement by people to strengthen autonomy and have a voice about their own future. It is a movement away from the cultural annihilation that comes from complete assimilation.

Inside the big picture I have just painted are individuals and families from both sides of this human collision, just trying to survive, to thrive, and to live ethically. People can and often have voluntarily given up language, along with other aspects of their heritage culture and way of life, for the sake of their own welfare and that of their children. And language is often one of the core components of the movement for cultural survival. This book is about families who so love their endangered languages of heritage that they have made them a part of their homes and their daily lives, despite all the pressures against doing so. And it is for families who might wish to do this brave act themselves.

ori and Hawaiian, Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Secwepemc (Shuswap) in Canada, and Mohawk, Seneca, and Blackfeet on the US mainland (and more), we see a new generation of fluent speakers of endangered languages growing up. Newer and more tolerant government policies in the Americas, Europe, and Australia have led to funding (though never sufficient, and never safe from the axe) for indigenous and minority language programs in schools and the wider communities.

On a more informal level, communities around the world have regular language classes taught by elder native speakers; or they run language camps; or individuals who did not learn their languages at home attach themselves to elders to learn as adults. It has been a great undertaking, with language activists overcoming many obstacles. The lack of support by policy makers and school officials, lack of steady funding, lack of school subject material in the languages and the paucity of language-learning programs and opportunities all still create roadblocks to the goal of language revitalization, yet the communities persevere and make progress, often astounding progress. These efforts have been documented over the last couple of decades in an increasing amount of literature by linguists, anthropologists, and educators.²

And yet, many of us would say that the most important locus of language revitalization is not in the schools, but rather the home, the last bastion from which the language was lost, and the primary place where first language acquisition occurs. Those who dream of language revitalization ultimately desire the natural transmission of the language from parent to child and its use in daily life. Most communities have not paid much attention to language in the home; or to be fair, they are only beginning to do so. Even teachers of heritage languages might not use them with their children. True reversal of language shift cannot be successful in the long run unless families make it their own process.³ It may be the lead generation of parent activists, who in many cases have had to learn their heritage languages as second languages, who initiate the return to using them at home. Or it may be the children of the activists, who have learned the language at school, and as adults bring the language to their home so that their own children will learn it as a first language. Either way, it is that step—of actually using the language in daily life at home—that is essential for true language revitalization. Margaret Noori put it like this in her profound essay Wenesh Waa Oshkii-Bmaadizijig Noondamowaad? What Will the Children Hear⁴:

Many have rightly reviled [Carlisle boarding school founder Capt. Richard H.] Pratt’s 1892 call for killing the Indian and saving the man.⁵ But few have given him credit for understanding something we would do well not to forget. Taking aim at the language was indeed an effective form of cultural genocide.⁶ Tearing children away from their homes is how it was accomplished. History has proven it is incredibly difficult to maintain ethnic identity without the language running like lifeblood through every daily act. If we are to learn from this lesson, the language must certainly be restored. And more importantly, the educational system that took it away cannot be depended upon to bring it back. We should not look for an answer in politics, policy or pedagogy alone. We must find the answer in practice and action. To reverse the damage, the language must be returned to the children and the home.

About the Chapters

The heart of this book is a set of autobiographical chapters by people who have done this very act of bringing their endangered (or even extinct) languages into their homes and speaking them with their children. We begin with the most extreme situation: languages that have had no speakers at all for generations. Shying away from the hopelessness of the word extinct, we call these languages dormant, or sleeping.⁷ One such case is the Myaamia (Miami) language, whose speakers originally lived throughout what is now known as Indiana and much of Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, and now, after two removals, live in areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere (Chapter 1). The last fluent native speaker of the language died sometime before Myaamia language activist Daryl Baldwin was born. Yet Daryl learned Myaamia, purely from documentation, going back to school for a degree in linguistics to assist him in the effort. He started using the language at home with his children as he learned, and now has four children who speak it proficiently. Two of them are old enough to write their own language life stories, and they do so in that chapter. This family’s accomplishment demonstrates how a committed group can bring their language from being extinct to having native speakers with just two generations working together. Daryl is also the only linguist I know personally who has had dissertations written about him.⁸

Jessie Little Doe Baird (Chapter 2) has a similar history. Like Daryl, she learned her language—Wampanoag—purely from documentation, getting herself a degree in linguistics from MIT along the way. She brought the language to her community in the form of language classes, and into the home for her youngest child, age five at the time of this writing. In 2010 Jessie received the prestigious MacArthur genius award for her great accomplishments and inspiration. An award-winning film about her work and the language revitalization efforts of Wampanoag has since been produced.⁹

Part II has two chapters by families who began their quest for their ancestral language when the last generation of native speakers was still alive, of grandparent and great-grandparent age. With the languages no longer being spoken aloud around the community, in each case the parents had to search out elders to learn their heritage tongue. Ellie Supahan-Albers (Chapter 3) and her twin sister, Nisha, had a great-aunt and great-uncle living at their home in Orleans, California, and were able to hear some Karuk as young children, though never enough to acquire it as a language of communication. Later they began a more focused effort at learning the language through the help of the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program run by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.¹⁰ Phil Albers did not begin learning Karuk until he was college age—he was initially taught by Ellie, and soon thereafter by her great-aunt and other elders. Ellie and Phil began talking to their children in Karuk in utero. Theirs is a deeply honest account that says much about the emotional basis of decisions to use an endangered language in one’s family, and how heart-wrenching it is to go on when the elders who know the language pass away.

In the Yuchi case (Chapter 4), Richard Grounds and his daughter Renée did a great deal of their language learning together. Richard took his daughter to elders on a regular basis to learn, and then they both made a habit of using whatever they learned in place of English from then on. Now a young adult, Renée can tell her own language story, and she writes probingly about the joys of knowing her heritage tongue as well as the burden of responsibility that comes with it.

Part III is about families who use their languages at home and also have strong community support in the way of immersion schools and other community-based programs. The Peters family (Chapter 5) were fluent native speakers of Mohawk but began using it at home with their own children only after acquiring inspiration from their immersion school program and the Longhouse ceremonial tradition.

ori language in her life, and also forthrightly discusses the fears and difficulties attached to bringing up her children in an endangered language.

(Chapter 7) learned most of their Hawaiian as college students and have been leaders in the development of Punana Leo and the Hawaiian immersion schools, as well as in the important university support programs for the Hawaiian language. They were also the first family in the Hawaiian revitalization movement to use only Hawaiian at home with their children.

Margaret Noori (Chapter 8), writing from her long experience with language revitalization in the Anishinaabe schools and with her family, shares her wisdom about how Anishinaabemowin at home fits into both the community culture, where immersion is possible, and more restrictive academic environments, where literacy and assessment are required.

Finally, Aodán Mac Póilin writes about the Shaw’s Road Gaeltacht, a neighborhood founded by Irish-speaking families in order to give their children a fully Irish-speaking community to live in.

Part IV is about two unusual cases, to show the scope of variation within the language revitalization movement. Chapter 10 is about efforts to maintain an endangered dialect of Greek, and it makes some strong points about the difficulty of bringing up children to full fluency in isolation from a speech community. Brian Bielenberg and Aigli Pittaka’s commitment to raising their son to be a balanced bilingual—or actually trilingual, in this case—led to the difficult choice of giving up promising careers in the United States in order to move to Cyprus, Aigli’s country of origin, so that their child would be able to grow up fluent in Aigli’s heritage dialect, Kypriaka. Nonetheless, the family still finds obstacles in the path to language learning. Even though Kypriaka is the Greek dialect of Cyprus, it is still threatened; the schools all teach in Standard Greek, and Kypriaka is in danger of giving way to the Standard.

In Chapter 11, Ezra Hale, son of the famous multilingual linguist Kenneth Hale, writes about the singular case of being brought up in the Warlpiri language half a world away from where it is spoken, showing the possibilities and limitations of achieving bilingualism away from the speech community a language comes from. Doing fieldwork in Australia, Ken fell deeply in love with the language, and, saddened by the thought that the younger generations no longer knew it, he decided to make it the language of his own home. He and his two sons conversed all their lives together in Warlpiri, up to the time of Ken’s death. Ezra gave a speech about his father at a memorial ceremony at MIT, all in Warlpiri.

Part V is about two programs designed specifically to help families learn language together. Chapter 12 is about the California language Kawaiisu, where an extended family is learning their language together under the mentorship of language educators. Their learning is specifically geared to language they can use every day at home with each other. This chapter illustrates in detail how a highly structured mentored language-learning program can function to help a family learn together.

Chapter 13 is about a multifaceted program designed by Finlay Macleoid for learning home-style Scottish Gaelic. Concerned that the Gaelic taught in the schools in Scotland does not transfer to everyday conversation at home, Macleoid developed a program that helps parents learn how to interact with their children in Gaelic, from diaper-changing to teen talk.

We end this volume with a final chapter on how a family who wishes to use their own heritage language at home can get started in that process. Summarizing the wisdom from the first thirteen chapters, we provide ideas on parent language learning, how to get started using the language with one’s children, and how to deal with the various obstacles that get in the way.

Each of these chapters is written from the heart, and each writer has his or her own personal style. I have done very little editing on most chapters, for they are so personal, so expressive of the feelings of the families, that they should stand as they were first expressed. The writers’ voices are fresh and clear and very much their own.

Yet the authors also have much in common. You will note, to begin with, that all the authors are committed to raising bilingual children. None have any desire to keep their children from learning the majority language of their country—they strive for balanced bilingualism, not for monolingualism in the heritage tongue. Yet because the majority language is everywhere, and the endangered language almost nowhere, the parents’ focus is always necessarily on how to bring more of the endangered language into their children’s lives. It will also be seen in these chapters that almost all the authors go beyond their immediate families to help lead their languages into the community. Furthermore, each author keeps in mind an audience of readers who would like to know how one goes about starting the journey of bringing an ancestral language back into the home, and so these writings impart a great deal of good advice and wisdom.

Finally, each author speaks eloquently to the efforts, heartaches, and joys of language revitalization in the home, and the wonder of hearing one’s children speak in what Joshua Fishman has so aptly called the beloved language.¹¹

Notes

1

UNESCO, UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, at http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/, 2010.

2

For example: Joshua A. Fishman, Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? (Clevedon, UK.: Multilingual Matters, 2000). Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, Saving Languages: An Introduction to Language Revitalization (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale (eds.), The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group, 2001). John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch, and Michael Walsh, Re-awakening languages; Theory and Practice in the Revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous Languages (Sydney: Sydney Univ. Press, 2010). Another important set of publications is the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Series, published from the annual conference of the same name and available at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/books.html.

3

Joshua Fishman coined the term Reversing language shift in his book by that title: Joshua A. Fishman, Reversing Language Shift (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1991).

4

Margaret Noori, Wenesh Waa Oshkii-Bmaadizijig Noondamowaad? What Will the Young Children Hear? in Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidance & Lessons Learned, ed. Jon Reyhner and Louise Lockard (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona Univ. College of Education, 2009).

5

R. H. Pratt, The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites (an extract of the Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction), in Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the Friends of the Indian, 1880–1900, ed. F. P. Prucha (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973).

6

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Linguistic Genocide in Education—Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000).

7

Wesley Leonard, When Is an ‘Extinct Language’ Not Extinct? Miami, a Formerly Sleeping Language, in Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, ed. Kendall King et al. (Georgetown: Georgetown Univ. Press, 2008).

8

Melissa A. Rinehart, Miami Indian Language Shift and Recovery (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2006); Wesley Leonard, Miami Language Reclamation in the Home: A Case Study (Ph.D. diss., UC Berkeley, 2007).

9

Anne Makepeace, We Still Live Here (Lakeville, CT: Makepeace, 2010). DVD available from www.MakepeaceProductions.com.

10

Leanne Hinton, Matt Vera, and Nancy Steele, How to Keep Your Language Alive: A Commonsense Approach to One-on-One Language Learning (Berkeley: Heyday, 2002).

11

Joshua Fishman, Maintaining Languages: What Works and What Doesn’t, in Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, ed. Gina Cantoni (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona Univ., 1996).

Part I

STARTING FROM ZERO

1: Miami

myaamiaataweenki oowaaha: MIAMI SPOKEN HERE

Daryl, Karen, Jessie, and Jarrid Baldwin

ceeleelintamaani niišwi iilaataweenkia. myaamia neehi english

(I like having two languages, Miami and English)

—awansaapia, nine years old

Daryl

Aya. kinwalaniihsia weenswiaani. karen weekimaki neehi niiwi piloohsaki eehsakiki. keemaacimwihkwa, ciinkwia, amehkoonsa, neehi awansaapia weenswiciki. myaamiaataweentiaanki wiihsa pipoonwa. ileeši kati neepwaanki ayoolhka.

Greetings! My name is Daryl. I am married to Karen and have four children. Their names are Jessie, Jarrid, Emma, and Elliot. We have been speaking to each other in the Myaamia language for many years, but there is more to learn.

For me personally, language is something that came to me later in life. I was always aware of my Myaamia (Miami) heritage through my father and grandfather, and fortunate to have had a great deal of historical knowledge about previous generations passed on to me. Culture for me was primarily shaped early in life through the intertribal experience, especially powwows. The only language I heard growing up was ancestral names, many of which I did not know the meanings of.

weecikiintiaanki ‘our family’. Photo by Karen Baldwin, courtesy of Myaamia Project Archive

Previous generations of my family were divided by our forced relocation in 1846 from homelands in north central Indiana to a reservation in the unorganized territory, which later became Kansas. In the 1870s our Kansas relatives underwent a second removal to Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Some of my ancestors stayed in Kansas and still others remained behind in Indiana and northwest Ohio. As a result of these removals, we as Myaamia people today find ourselves scattered from Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma, with families living in almost every state. We are a fragmented community with tribal lands currently consisting of a checkerboard of approximately 1,319 acres primarily located in our jurisdictional area in Ottawa County, in northeastern Oklahoma. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe with thirty-seven hundred on its citizenship rolls, but there are easily twice that number of individuals throughout the Midwest with Myaamia ancestry.

Linguists refer to our language as Miami-Illinois. The Illinois people were a loose confederation of villages located throughout what is now the state of Illinois. Their descendants are today recognized as members of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma. The Miami and Illinois groups all spoke slightly different dialects of the same language. All things considered, there are likely ten thousand individuals who can claim ancestry to the Miami-Illinois people.

A desire to pursue my heritage on a deeper level through the language coincided with a key moment in my life. My wife and I had just had our first child and I was entertaining the idea of pursuing higher education, which would bring to an end a successful ten-year career as a carpenter. As a first-generation college student who was married with young children, I knew that college would be very challenging. Determined not to wait any longer to pursue a new path, I quit my career in carpentry, my wife quit her job as a schoolteacher, we sold most of what we owned, and I went back to school. I had no way of knowing the hardships that would come over the next ten years and how deeply my commitment to learning my heritage language would be tested.

During these years of transition, I distinctly remember finding a word list of the Myaamia language buried in my grandfather’s personal papers, which I had recently received. The language was not his, as he was not a speaker, but it was the first time I had seen what I considered my heritage language and I was curious to know if it was still spoken. I asked my father if he knew any speakers and he suggested I travel to both Indiana and Oklahoma to find if any speakers existed in the two Myaamia communities. I followed through with his recommendation and soon learned that the last speakers had passed nearly at the same time I was born, in the early 1960s. There would be no speakers to learn from, and at the time, it wasn’t fully known what documentation was available or if there were any audio recordings.

I remember feeling a sense of loss but also a sense of responsibility when I learned of the status of our language. I became determined to try and learn what I could. At the time I was not familiar with the use of the term extinct in referring to our ancestral language. I would soon become familiar with the terms dead, dying, and extinct in reference to languages and would eventually come to challenge these notions as inappropriately applied to well-documented languages that have communities interested in reclamation.

We really didn’t start actively learning the language until my second child came along in 1991. In the beginning, the language consisted of word lists and the desire to name things: household items, birds, animals, and other familiar items common to everyday activities served as our starting point. Word lists taped to walls, counters, and cabinets served as the learning mechanism, along with folded notes in my pockets as I went about my day. My first two children were still very young and so they naturally became part of the learning process, as rudimentary as our effort was. We approached the effort collectively as a family. We were young and uninformed but we were very committed.

During our home efforts of the early 1990s, I remember struggling with pronunciation and understanding the verb system. At that time, a graduate student named David Costa was studying linguistics at Berkeley and was reconstructing the Miami-Illinois language as part of his dissertation research. I remember getting a draft of his dissertation in the mail and, upon opening it, becoming overwhelmed by the linguistic description and jargon. I was just finishing up my undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Montana and decided