25.2 (Summer 2001) Endangered Languages, Endangered Lives

Gumbaynggirr

Gumbaynggirr -- an Aboriginal language of northern coastal New South Wales in Australia -- has made a significant comeback in recent years. Like most indigenous languages in the southeast of Australia, it had borne the brunt of early and sustained contact with settlers. Official policies toward indigenous languages ranged from indifference to active discouragement of their use. By the early 1970s it looked like Gumbaynggirr might soon become extinct.

For reasons out of our hands: A Community identifies the causes of language shift

What causes a community to shift from one language to another is generally a significant consideration for language maintenance programs. Yet research in specific language communities seldom investigates the community's ideas about the causes of its language shift. The researcher thus runs a risk of assuming that the attitudes of one or two key informants reflect the attitudes of the entire community. This assumption might in turn influence the direction of the research and may render it irrelevant to the community's needs.

Desert Foods: Nutritious, Delicious and Necessary for Survival

The raspy sound of grinding mesquite beans fills the humid summertime air. Monsoon rains have returned to the Tucson basin to quench the desert's thirst, sprout wildflowers, and help to produce a healthy crop of kui (O'odham for mesquite beans). As I sit in front of the grinding stone, the edible seed-pods became a fine golden powder, filling the air with a sweet, wholesome earthiness not unlike the smell of the desert after a monsoon.

Cultural Survival vs. Forced Assimilation: the renewed war on diversity

Ethnologue, published by SIL International, estimates that of the more than two million people who identify themselves as American Indians in the United States, only 361, 978 still speak one of the remaining 154 indigenous languages, and many of those are only spoken by the very old. This is about half the number of languages spoken in 1492 in what would become the United States.

Can This Language be Saved?

Words are fascinating things. With meanings that expand and contract, they can be popularized, bought and sold in a linguistic marketplace, or, if denied access, they can be forced off the conversational road, never to be heard from again. Atapaka, for instance, was on someone's lips one hundred years ago, as were Wyandot, Galice, Nootsack, Salinan, Twana, and Lumbee. At the time, linguists documenting Native American languages noted that people spoke Chumash and Tonkawa with the same healthy conviction that we use Spanish, French, or English.

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