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The cultures of Native North American language documentation and revitalization
Abstract
The reviewed books comprise an emerging ethnographic literature on endangered language documentation and revitalization in Native North America. Language loss and preservation are pressing concerns for tribal communities, galvanizing activists and researchers to develop classroom curricula and literacy traditions in hopes of producing new speakers. While the reviewed books show that this goal often goes unrealized, we nevertheless read them as grounds for optimism. Even if language revitalization rarely increases the everyday use of particular lexical and grammatical codes, it may succeed in accomplishing another important goal: facilitating indigenous communities’ efforts to create for themselves more meaningful contemporary cultures.
... Some language reclamation projects have found success working exclusively with archival sources (Hinton 2003;ANA 2006;Baldwin & Olds 2007;Whalen et al. 2016Whalen et al. , 2018; 1 such work is a partnership-at-a-distance between the institutions that store and curate the materials, the researchers who deposit them, and the users of the materials. Archival materials are decontextualized (Schwartz & Dobrin 2016;Gaby & Woods 2020:e273;Dobrin & Schwartz 2021) from their original utterance, and depositors and archives both can do much to ensure that language collections are as robust and as useful as possible. In this paper, we report on the results of a review of language archives, with a concentration on sites and organizations with substantial holdings of digital data in and about endangered languages. ...
While digital archiving has long been standard for linguistics, archives themselves are heterogeneous (Aznar & Seifart 2020), and archived linguistic material is important for researchers and communities, particularly for language reclamation (cf. Baldwin & Olds 2007; Whalen et al. 2016; Hinton 2003, 2018; Kung et al. 2020). The format and usability of scholarly archival collections is shaped by the functions of the management practices at the stewarding institution, making an appreciation of the range of access services provided by such institutions relevant to the evaluation of individual collections.
Here we report on a review of 41 digital language archives. Three factors are examined: 1) accessibility, including metadata and site navigation; 2) discoverability, or searchability and internal navigation; and 3) functionality, the overall ease of data retrieval and use. We recognize that the decisions made by both stewards and depositors can greatly impact the accessibility of archived materials; to that end, we present recommendations for how archives might increase the utility of their holdings for their users. We emphasize that our intention is not to dissuade linguists from using archives because of these issues, and we recognize the tremendous amount of work that goes into the upkeep of digital infrastructure, often with very limited institutional support. Implementing such recommendations at an institutional level can establish a fairer peer-review process of archival collections. By delineating precisely what standards fall under the archive management level and what procedures individual depositors are responsible for, the roles of “archivist” and “depositor” become clearer.
Forms of Hopi cultural knowledge, and the Hopi language in particular, circulate across Indigenous and settler speech communities. Circulation is a process of recontextualization. In connecting sites of usage, it brings into being different regimes of intertextuality that can either amplify or diminish Hopi presence. To illustrate this, I look at three instances in which outsiders recontextualize Hopi objects or language: archaeologists use potsherds to establish timelines, non‐Hopi people use Hopi words as pet and brand names, and I use Hopi sentences for linguistic analysis in my own research. Each recontextualization threatens to erase Hopi presence in the here and now, which tribal members contest through acts of what I call indexical tethering. [intertextuality, recontextualization, language, appropriation, Indigeneity, presence and erasure, Hopi]
Citizenship has become a major topic in anthropology and the study of language (including sociolinguistics) since the early 1990s, with scholars in these fields especially examining the status and political claims of immigrants, refugees, indigenous groups, and other subaltern populations. This article argues that models of communication lie at the heart of debates about citizenship and explores two fundamentally communicative processes: first, the mutual recognition of citizens as citizens, and second, the interpellation by state apparatuses of citizens. It first discusses the emergence of the question of citizenship within anthropology and the study of language. It then considers the tension that arises as any recognition of difference confronts the normative model of citizenship already institutionalized in the state apparatus. Finally, this article examines the interlacing of these scholarly trajectories in one of the premier sites where citizens communicate as citizens: the public sphere.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 48 is October 23, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
A growing literature in linguistic anthropology critically examines the rhetoric of endangered language advocacy. A number of themes remain underexplored, however, including the invocation of “culture” to justify language preservation, the interests of communities without fluent heritage language speakers, and anthropology's contribution to potentially problematic advocacy tropes. Discourses like “language is the core of culture” and “when a language dies, a culture dies” are widespread in language activism even though they undermine communities’ efforts to maintain distinctive cultural identities in the wake of language shift and put dormant language communities in a double bind. While Boasian anthropology contains anti‐essentialist and counter‐nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and race, some Herderian advocacy tropes are borrowed from the (also Boasian) tradition of linguistic relativity in its popular Whorfian iteration. Drawing on my research on Chiwere language politics, I identify two forms of agency available to endangered and dormant language communities: one form of agency resists language loss but accepts dominant ideologies of national difference that make heritage languages essential to indigenous cultural identities, while another form of agency accepts language loss but resists Herderian nationalist expectations that authentic indigenous communities speak their traditional languages. [advocacy rhetoric, dormant language communities, language and culture ideologies, agency, Chiwere]
Voice is a relationship between subject and object in relation to verb in a sentence. Fulfulde verbs have three types of voices: active voice, middle voice and passive voice. The three voices also mark tenses such as past, present, habitual, and future. In Fulfulde language, voice are attached with tenses and marked on verbs. This paper intends to look at the voice and Tense affixes that are attached to verbs, with the aim to identify which affixes are frequently used and which are not frequently used in today Adamawa Dialect. The paper will then describe the productivity of these affixes and how some are lost over time, which is probably an evidence of 'language change in progress'.
While the macro variables of language shift are well understood, e.g., economic pressures and standard language ideology, we question if reference to generalized factors is explanatory? We argue that explanatory adequacy in a science of language shift can only be achieved through ethnographic engagement with the particular histories and interpretive practices of linguistic communities to understand what changing patterns of language use mean for the people in question. We show through comparing and contrasting ethnographic accounts that language shift occurs at the interface between languages and culturally-elaborated meanings, beliefs, and habits that guide people’s linguistic interpretations, actions, and choices.
Like other Native American communities left without fluent speakers of their indigenous languages, Ioways and Otoe-Missourias now rely on texts to learn Chiwere, their heritage language. This epistemological shift from speakers to texts has increased pedagogical pressures on orthographies since literacy has become the primary means of heritage language socialization and revitalization. Comparing language learning materials in use today to nineteenth-century missionary primers reveals that Chiwere orthographies and literacy have long been used to promote enculturation. While missionaries employed Chiwere literacy in their effort to convert and “civilize” Ioways and Otoe-Missourias, current language revitalization resources seek to socialize language learners to a nostalgic notion of “traditional” culture rooted in recursive entextualizations and recontextualizations of elders' words.
Collaborative research partnerships between academic anthropologists and host or descendant communities are becoming more popular in anthropology. The reviewed books demonstrate there are different understandings of what collaboration means for professional identities and expertise across subfields. Therefore, such partnerships are unlikely to promote cross-subfield integration. Nevertheless, while their collaborative styles diverge, the reviewed authors are motivated by a shared interpretation of disciplinary responsibilities and opportunities that emerges from anthropology's longstanding commitment to fieldwork and also reflects post-World War II historical transformations. Their shared interpretation raises challenging questions for the discipline at large about professional practices like evaluation.
The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Although each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the discipline. © 2003 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
The article discusses contemporary Miami language practices in relation to prevailing notions of Native American languages as antiquated or extinct. Particular focus is given to the use of the myaamia language as spoken by modern Miami peoples. According to the author, contemporary usages of both English and myaamia demonstrate the Miami people's adaptation and persistence. Details related to Miami language practices in song, games, and everyday communication are presented. Topics discussed include language reclamation and notions of success and failure surrounding language revivals.
This book provides an overview of the issues surrounding language loss. It brings together work by theoretical linguists, field linguists, and non-linguist members of minority communities to provide an integrated view of how language is lost, from sociological and economic as well as from linguistic perspectives. The contributions to the volume fall into four categories. The chapters by Dorian and Grenoble and Whaley provide an overview of language endangerment. Grinevald, England, Jacobs, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer describe the situation confronting threatened languages from both a linguistic and sociological perspective. The understudied issue of what (beyond a linguistic system) can be lost as a language ceases to be spoken is addressed by Mithun, Hale, Jocks, and Woodbury. In the last section, Kapanga, Myers-Scotton, and Vakhtin consider the linguistic processes which underlie language attrition.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This innovative cultural history examines wide-ranging issues of religion, politics, and identity through an analysis of the American Indian Ghost Dance movement and its significance for two little-studied tribes: the Shoshones and Bannocks. The Ghost Dance has become a metaphor for the death of American Indian culture, but as Gregory Smoak argues, it was not the desperate fantasy of a dying people but a powerful expression of a racialized "Indianness." While the Ghost Dance did appeal to supernatural forces to restore power to native peoples, on another level it became a vehicle for the expression of meaningful social identities that crossed ethnic, tribal, and historical boundaries. Looking closely at the Ghost Dances of 1870 and 1890, Smoak constructs a far-reaching, new argument about the formation of ethnic and racial identity among American Indians. He examines the origins of Shoshone and Bannock ethnicity, follows these peoples through a period of declining autonomy vis-a-vis the United States government, and finally puts their experience and the Ghost Dances within the larger context of identity formation and emerging nationalism which marked United States history in the nineteenth century.
Adventures in Yiddishland examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddishfrom Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers as well as those who know little or no Yiddishin communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of "Yiddishland". © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. Converting Words includes original analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas-as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. Lucidly written and vividly detailed, this important work presents a new approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that will illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond, and will be essential reading across disciplinary boundaries.
In Fixing the Books, Erin Debenport presents the research she conducted on an indigenous language literacy effort within a New Mexico Pueblo community, and the potential of that literacy to compromise Pueblo secrecy. She analyzes the decision to produce written materials in a historically oral language and whether that decision is at odds with the linguistically and culturally “conservative” reputation of Southwest tribes, and potentially disrupts the control of both the intra- and intercommunity circulation of cultural knowledge. Debenport concentrates on the role of literacy in the formation of groups and the ways such groups have been connected to political participation, using the case study of San Ramón Pueblo (she uses pseudonyms throughout) as a counterexample to some of the prototypical cases of textual circulation. She concludes that an apparent contradiction surrounding this pueblo’s literacy effort is actually a reflection of the often unexpected uses of texts that occur in contexts of revitalization and emergent literacy and the multiple language ideologies being utilized by community members. © 2015 by the School for Advanced Research. All rights reserved.
The Bearer of This Letter illuminates the enduring effects of colonialism by examining the decades-long tension between written words and spoken words in a reservation community. Drawing on archival sources and her own extensive work in the community, Mindy J. Morgan investigates how historical understandings of literacy practices challenge current Indigenous language revitalization efforts on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Created in 1887, Fort Belknap is home to the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples. The history of these two peoples over the past century is a common one among Indigenous groups, with religious and federal authorities aggressively promoting the use of English at the expense of the local Indigenous languages. Morgan suggests that such efforts at the assimilation of Indigenous peoples had a far-reaching and not fully appreciated consequence. Through a close reading of federal, local, and missionary records at Fort Belknap, Morgan demonstrates how the government used documents as a means of restructuring political and social life as well as regulating access to resources during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, the residents of Fort Belknap began to use written English as a means of negotiating with the government and when arguing for structural change during the early reservation period while maintaining distinct arenas for Indigenous language use. These linguistic practices have significantly shaped the community's perceptions of the utility of writing and continue to play a central role in contemporary language programs that increasingly rely on standardized orthographies for Indigenous language programs.
The Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe's most ancient tongues and a vital part of today's lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork and close examination of a vast range of documents to uncover the strategies that have been used to preserve and revive Basque and the various controversies that have arisen among language advocates. Reclaiming Basque offers a new perspective on language activism as a dynamic and evolving social movement. It addresses the complex issue of what it means to speak Basque in the contemporary Basque Country, as well as the roles of minority languages, language policies, and cultural identity in a globalized world.
This incisive ethnographic analysis of indigenous language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization focuses on linguistic heritage issues on the Native American reservation at Fort Apache and explores the broader social, political and religious influences on changing language practices in indigenous communities. Offers a focused ethnographic analysis of an indigenous community that also explores global issues of language endangerment and maintenance and their socio-historical contexts. Addresses the complexities and conflicts in language documentation and revitalization programs, and how they articulate with localized discourse genres, education practices, religious beliefs, and politics. Examines differing evaluations of language loss, and maintenance, among members of affected communities, and their creative responses to challenges posed by encompassing socio-cultural regimes, including university accredited language experts. Provides an ethnographic analysis of speech in indigenous communities that moves beyond narrowly conceived language documentation to consider changing linguistic and social identities.
This article is an account of a long-term linguistic fieldwork project at San Antonio Pueblo, New Mexico, an indigenous North American community that places great emphasis on controlling access to cultural and linguistic materials. Using two previous accounts of linguistic fieldwork to frame critical ethical issues (Matras, Language contact, language endangerment, and the role of the “salvation linguist”, Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, 2005; Wilkins, Australian Journal of Linguistics 12: 171–200, 1992), I present my experience of working collaboratively with a tribe who limits the circulation of indigenous language materials and shapes the scope of my research inquiries. As part of my account, I delineate the advantages and challenges of this partnership over time, present an account of my role as researcher, and analyze the ethics of gain and loss for both fieldworkers and indigenous communities. In doing this, I argue for the efficacy of reflexivity, continuously examining one's place in a community of study, and engaging with the experiences of other fieldworkers in order to craft ethical research projects.
The field of folklore is experiencing topic drift, as the gap widens between the name of the field and what it now signifies. This article traces the history of a mutating disciplinary subject and its relationship to the discipline's formation, institutionalization, and name. Three themes are of special importance: folklore's temporality or the problem of a contemporary subject, orality and the question of technology, and folklore as a mode of cultural production. This explication of folklore as a keyword goes to the root of our history as a field, to the atavism that popular understanding preserves in the notion of folklore as error, and to the revolutionary energy that Walter Benjamin found in its embrace.
The focus of this article is a short narrative text that was recorded during the author’s fieldwork on the endangered Papuan language Arapesh. An explication of the text following the principles of Hymesian verse analysis provides a rich source of evidence about the speaker’s experience of cultural transformation as refracted in the research encounter. This comes across explicitly, through the text’s remarkable content, and indexically through aspects of its form. The analysis helps reveal the subtle and sometimes problematic ways in which fieldworkers as cross-cultural interlocutors shape the encounters that are reified in the documentary objects they produce.
Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts to bring their traditional languages back through educational programs, for some communities these efforts are not enough or have come too late to stem the tide of language death, which occurs when there are no remaining fluent speakers and the language is no longer used in regular communication. The Maliseet language, as spoken in the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, Canada, is one such endangered language that will either be revitalized and survive or will die off. Defying Maliseet Language Death is an ethnographic study by Bernard C. Perley, a member of this First Nation, that examines the role of the Maliseet language and its survival in Maliseet identity processes. Perley examines what is being done to keep the Maliseet language alive, who is actively involved in these processes, and how these two factors combine to promote Maliseet language survival. He also explores questions of identity, asking the important question: “If Maliseet is no longer spoken, are we still Maliseet?” This timely volume joins the dual issues of language survival and indigenous identity to present a unique perspective on the place of language within culture.
This research explores the development of landmark federal language policy in the United States: the Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992 (NALA). Overturning more than two centuries of United States American Indian policy, NALA established the federal role in preserving and protecting Native American languages. Indigenous languages in the United States are currently experiencing unprecedented language shift and NALA is a primary federal resource for Native American language programs. This research examines the local and national contexts and interests in which NALA developed from a grass-roots Native American language movement in the 1980s. The story of NALA stands as a powerful example of traditonally disenfranchised peoples transforming power relationships and creating language policy to support their language educaton practices and goals.
The alarming projection that up to ninety per cent of the world's languages will become extinct by the end of this century has prompted a new sense of urgency among linguists and other language scholars to rush out and record the last utterances from the last speakers of ‘endangered languages’. As the last speaker utters her/his last words, the ‘expert’ is there to record this important moment and preserve it for all time. Among the benefits from such preservation efforts is the ability to play back the recordings at any time in any place. In popular media this process is described as ‘saving the language’ through recording and documentation. Unfortunately, these recordings are not living voices. Rather, they are zombie voices—undead voices that are disembodied and techno-mechanized. They are cursed with being neither dead nor alive. They become artefacts of technological interventions, as well as expert valorisations of linguistic codes. Expert rhetoric compounds the problem by the use of metaphoric frames such as death, endangerment and extinction. Metaphors not only frame discourses of language endangerment, but they also frame and influence actions and interventions. This essay critically evaluates the metaphors used by language experts to understand the unintended consequences for community members who are actively revitalising and reclaiming their languages. The essay also identifies key strategies used by community language activists to ignore existing metaphors, while creating new metaphors to potentiate new solutions to language death to promote emergent vitalities.
Varying definitions of culture. The ethnologist's or culture-historian's use of the term. Individual culture as a traditional ideal. The general spirit of the "genius" of a national civilization; France and Rusia as examples. Genuine culture, as here defined, possible on all levels of civilization; culture may be but a spurious thing in the most sophisticated or progressive of societies. Efficiency no measure of culture. Maladjustments between cultural values and new economic conditions. Immediate ends and remoter ends of human activity. Tendency toward a gradual shift of emphasis, the immediate ends coming to be felt as means toward the remoter ends, which originally resulted from the play of surplus energy. Necessity of the psychological shift owing to modern man's inability to arrive at individual mastery within the sphere of direct ends. The relation of the individual to the culture of the group. A rich cultural heritage needed to enable the individual to find himself. The relativity of cultural values. The cultural utilization of the past. The self, finding itself in its cultural environment, must be granted a primary reality. The significance of art for culture. The danger of spreading a culture over a large territory. The independence of economic-political and cultural bounds. The intensive development of culture within a restricted area no bar to internationalism. The unsatisfactory condition of contemporary America from the point of view of a genuine culture.
As an outsider, I would feel very uncomfortable if I were to advocate to a speech community that it ought to try to keep its language alive. It is entirely up to the community or to individuals within a community as to whether they want to put in the effort to develop new speakers for their language. Community members have the right to advocate within their community for the survival of their language; someone from outside the community does not. The right to language choice includes the right to choose against a language. This is the logical result of believing that maintaining an indigenous language is a matter of human rights, a belief virtually all language advocates must share. The outside expert’s role is to assist in providing the means for language survival or revival to motivated community members and perhaps to provide encouragement and a sense of hope that it can be done. (Leanne Hinton, 2002:151–52)
Bronislaw Malinowski’s pathbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific is at once a detailed account of exchange in the Melanesian islands and a manifesto of a modernist anthropology. Malinowski argued that the goal of which the ethnographer should never lose sight is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.’ Through vivid evocations of Kula life, including the building and launching of canoes, fishing expeditions and the role of myth and magic amongst the Kula people, Malinowski brilliantly describes an inter-island system of exchange-from gifts from father to son to swapping fish for yams-around which an entire community revolves. A classic of anthropology that did much to establish the primacy of painstaking fieldwork over the earlier anecdotal reports of travel writers, journalists and missionaries, it is a compelling insight into a world now largely lost from view. With a new foreword by Adam Kuper.
This paper reports on findings from an interpretive policy analysis of the development and impacts of landmark federal legislation in support of Native American languages: the 1990/1992 Native American Languages Act (NALA). Overturning more than two centuries of federal Indian policy, NALA established the federal role in preserving and protecting Native American languages. Indigenous languages in the USA are currently experiencing unprecedented language shift. This shift is largely the result of past language education policy for Native Americans which included repressive policies intended to eradicate Native American languages. NALA as it supports and protects Native languages is a reversal of these past policies. Although some argue that NALA has come too late and is largely ineffectual (funding has been limited and most Native American languages are already in serious decline), others link NALA to the twin goals of enhanced tribal sovereignty and academic achievement. This is the first in-depth study that examines the development, implementation, and impact of this policy initiative.
This article sketches the effects of 100 years of missionary presence
on how people in the San Carlos Apache community regard language and the
idea of a “language expert.” Evangelical Christian practice
demands an Apache language emptied of all indexical associations with
non-Christian Apache cultural practices. The reservation is home to
perhaps two dozen missions and churches, each of which takes a slightly
different view of the role of Apache language and culture in religious
practice. In an exploration of the translation practices of Phillip Goode,
a San Carlos Apache interpreter, and of early Lutheran missionaries on the
reservation, it is argued that Bible translation is a key factor in
shifting ideas about language as a purely referential system on the
reservation. This shifting language ideology has repercussions on how
people in the community consider the prospects for language
revitalization. a