Smithsonian archives preserve lost and dying languages

Daryl Baldwin learned about the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives when he was trying to find out more about his Native American heritage and the language of his tribe, the Miami of Oklahoma.

He was 28 and working construction in Ohio when he came across some Miami words his late grandfather had written in his personal papers. Baldwin knew nothing of the language except some ancestral names, but the words piqued his interest. There were no Miami speakers left, but a friend mentioned the archives, an immense hoard of recorded voices, documents and other materials describing more than 250 languages from all over the world.

The archives had been accumulating for more than 150 years, the findings of scholars, explorers, soldiers and travelers, and was now stored in a vast warehouse on a grassy campus in Suitland. It included copious material on about 200 Native American languages, many of them endangered, and a considerable number, like Miami, with no remaining native speakers.

Eventually Baldwin made the trip to see what the archives had on his ancestral language. There was plenty. With the archives’ help, he taught himself Miami and has been speaking and studying it for 24 years.

Preserving voices

The archives have the equivalent of two miles of shelves of dictionaries, word lists, field notes, journals, manuscripts, correspondence, reports, maps, catalogue cards and printed memorabilia. There are more than a million photographs, 20,000 works of indigenous art, 8 million feet of original film and videotape and more than 3,000 sound recordings of various languages: wax cylinders, aluminum discs, reel-to-reel tape, cassettes and CDs. The Cheyenne, from the Great Plains, are represented by 149 grammars, manuscripts and other items. There are two papers describing the speakers of Yapese, from the island of Yap, in Micronesia.

The Native American materials date to the 1850s, when the early Smithsonian mailed questionnaires to army forts and trading posts on the western frontier, asking settlers and travelers to compile word lists so the young United States could learn and preserve indigenous languages whose future, even then, was threatened. These fill-in-the-blanks circulars start with nouns (“God,” “devil” and “angel” are the first three queries) and move on to verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions. One 1852 form offered more than 300 entries transcribed from the language spoken by the Ojibwa, or Chippewa, who lived in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario.

Native American visitors

When Baldwin began studying Miami in the early 1990s, few scholars knew about the extent of the archives, or even of its existence. Today, encouraged by Smithsonian staff and their own leaders, Native Americans from across the country are visiting it to learn about their language and heritage.

“Language is not just one thing. It has a cultural and community context,” Baldwin said. “We have to get the knowledge to the community, and the archives are the historical repository where you can find all the different resources.”

Today Baldwin directs a Miami language and cultural institute, the Myaamia Center, at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, and is closely allied with the Smithsonian in the National Museum of Natural History’s Recovering Voices program, which promotes the archives as a tool in restoring and revitalizing native languages.

Recovering Voices organizes a biennial workshop for around 60 Native American delegates to learn about the archives and attend seminars on how to use linguistics as a teaching aid. Last year, 19 tribes sent representatives, including the Miwok and Maidu, from central California; the Pawnee, from Kansas and Nebraska; the Powhatan, from Virginia; and the Nipmuck, from Massachusetts.

The archives constantly receive new material and each addition offers new insights, some of which have nothing to do with language.

When head archivist Gina Rappaport examined 700 photographic negatives from Edward S. Curtis’s iconic 20-volume “The North American Indian,” completed in 1930, she found that Curtis, primarily an art photographer, had doctored some raw negatives to remove troublesome but revealing incongruities. The raw negative of one famous image had a Hopi woman standing on top of an adobe building holding an open umbrella. The printed photo had no umbrella. Another raw negative showed two men in ceremonial dress with an alarm clock on the ground between them. In the published photo, the alarm clock had disappeared.

But the core of the archives are collections gathered by such tireless researchers as John Peabody Harrington, whose work takes up 683 feet of shelf space and has information on more than 130 indigenous languages he documented in the early and mid-1900s for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. For Baldwin, the key materials were notes and reports by Swiss-born linguist Albert Samuel Gatchet, who, in the years straddling the beginning of the 20th century, documented Miami vocabulary and compiled a grammar.

Learning a ‘lost’ language

Baldwin left construction work, enrolled in the University of Montana and eventually earned a master’s degree in linguistics. “There was still a lot of rhetoric in graduate school about ‘lost’ or ‘extinct’ languages,” Baldwin recalled. “But I always felt that if there were materials and communities that were interested, there was no such thing.” So he and his wife home-schooled their four children in the Miami language and proved that it was not extinct. All use Miami in their family life, and the Miami tribe of Oklahoma hired Baldwin’s eldest son, Jarrid, 23, as a language instructor.

Baldwin and linguist David Costa, the friend who first directed him to the Smithsonian archives, have built on the work of Gatchet, but after more than 20 years have only looked at only 30 percent of the available material.

When Recovering Voices began in 2009, it sought not only to help bring Native Americans in contact with threatened languages but also to “learn why languages cease to be spoken,” said program manager Ruth Rouvier. “Why does it happen, and what can we do about it?”

Rouvier is a disciple of Leanne Hinton, a University of California at Berkeley linguist who in the early 1990s was one of the first to focus on vanishing Native American languages and ways to keep them alive. She created a project called Breath of Life, bringing indigenous Californians to Berkeley to use the university archives. This concept — letting the research serve the people from whom the material was collected — has spread widely and lies at the core of Recovering Voices.

“I’ve been a Breath of Life instructor, and it is very important that people have access to these heritage documents,” said Baldwin, whose Myaamia center leads planning for the next Recovering Voices workshop. “There’s not only the ‘wow!’ factor. There have been instances where people found material on specific ancestors and have even heard a great-grandmother’s voice. The work is not just about language, but about recovering pieces of your identity.”

What gives the archive an even greater impact, perhaps, is that the experts who collected the documents probably never thought they would be used again. “They recognized that languages and traditions were being lost, and they documented them for posterity,” Rouvier said. “I wonder what they would think now.”
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References:

Gugliotta, Guy. 2014. “Smithsonian archives preserve lost and dying languages”. The Washington Post. Posted: January 20, 2014. Available online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/smithsonian-archives-preserve-lost-and-dying-languages/2014/01/17/2a2c3218-74a1-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html

Oxford University mission to save a language spoken by three people

A team of academics from Oxford University have been sent to a remote area of Indonesia in order to save a language spoken by only three people.

The trio are the last people to speak Dusner, an ancient language spoken in a remote fishing village deep in the jungles of Papua, an Indonesian island.

The scientists were nearly too late as recent earthquakes and flooding nearly finished off the community – which still uses the language in ceremonies like marriage – for good.

Researchers from university’s Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics uncovered the language, and Dr Suriel Mofu set off for Indonesia in October to record and document the language.

But days after he left, flooding hit Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province and the Oxford team could not determine whether or not the Dusner speakers – two woman aged 60, and a man in his 70s – had survived.

Now Dr Mofu has made contact with the Dusner speakers and the 14-month project to record the vocabulary and grammar of the speakers.

Professor Mary Dalrymple, the project’s leader, said: "The flood in Indonesia has been a real tragedy for the inhabitants of this wonderful island and it’s been a nervous few months waiting to hear whether or not our speakers survived.

"But this illustrates why our project is so important – we only found out that this language existed last year, and if we don’t document the language before it dies out, it will be lost forever."

The reason the language has dwindled is that many locals now teach their children Malay as they consider it more useful to get jobs.

But Dusner is still used in ceremonies.

"Our project to record and document this language of Dusner has an urgency about it, because one of its speakers died last year," said Prof Dalrymple.

"The language of Dusner has died out as parents realised that their children have a better chance of going to university or getting a job if they speak Malay, which is Indonesia’s main tongue.

"The remaining Dusner speakers have children of their own, but have not taught them Dusner and so the language will die with them.

"Our project is important to non-Dusner speaking inhabitants of Papua, who want to use Dusner in their sacred wedding and funerary rituals."

It is estimated that half of the 6,000 recorded languages spoken in the world will vanish in the next 50 years.

According to the academics the level of enthusiasm among the Dusner people and the head of the village of Dusner for preserving their language is very high.

The community still perform traditional activities - such as marriage proposals, dowry payment, marriage ceremonies - only the Dusner speakers can use the Dusner language for these occasions.

There is great fear in the community that the people will lose the language when these speakers die.

Since Dusner has never been written, traditional stories and experiences have been passed from one generation to another orally.
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References:

Alleyne, Richard. 2011. "Oxford University mission to save a language spoken by three people". Telegraph. Posted: April 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8463840/Oxford-University-mission-to-save-a-language-spoken-by-three-people.html

Language researchers chart vanishing voices - video

In a video produced by Cambridge University, anthropologist Mark Turin discusses his work helping speakers of Thangmi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal. He aims to document disappearing languages, most of which haven't been written down before, as part of the World Oral Literature Project.



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References:

2011. "Language researchers chart vanishing voices - video". Guardian. Posted: February 22, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/feb/22/language-researchers-vanishing-voices-video

Are dying languages worth saving?

Language experts are gathering at a university in the UK to discuss saving the world's endangered languages. But is it worth keeping alive dialects that are sometimes only spoken by a handful of people, asks Tom de Castella?

"Language is the dress of thought," Samuel Johnson once said.

About 6,000 different languages are spoken around the world. But the Foundation for Endangered Languages estimates that between 500 and 1,000 of those are spoken by only a handful of people. And every year the world loses around 25 mother tongues. That equates to losing 250 languages over a decade - a sad prospect for some.

This week a conference in Carmarthen, west Wales, organised by the foundation, is being attended by about 100 academics. They are discussing indigenous languages in Ireland, China, Australia and Spain.

"Different languages will have their quirks which tell us something about being human," says Nicholas Ostler, the foundation's chairman.

"And when languages are lost most of the knowledge that went with them gets lost. People do care about identity as they want to be different. Nowadays we want access to everything but we don't want to be thought of as no more than people on the other side of the world."

Apart from English, the United Kingdom has a number of other languages. Mr Ostler estimates that half a million people speak Welsh, a few thousand Scots are fluent in Gaelic, about 400 people speak Cornish, while the number of Manx speakers - the language of the Isle of Man - is perhaps as small as 100. But is there any point in learning the really minor languages?

Last speaker dies

"I do think it's a good thing for a child on the Isle of Man to learn Manx. I value continuity in a community."

In Europe, Mr Ostler's view seems to command official support. There is a European Charter for Regional Languages, which every European Union member has signed, and the EU has a European Language Diversity For All programme, designed to protect the most threatened native tongues. At the end of last year the project received 2.7m euros to identify those languages most at risk.

But for some this is not just a waste of resources but a misunderstanding of how language works. The writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik says it is "irrational" to try to preserve all the world's languages.

Earlier this year, the Bo language died out when an 85-year-old member of the Bo tribe in the India-owned Andaman islands died.

While it may seem sad that the language expired, says Mr Malik, cultural change is driving the process.

"In one sense you could call it a cultural loss. But that makes no sense because cultural forms are lost all the time. To say every cultural form should exist forever is ridiculous." And when governments try to prop languages up, it shows a desire to cling to the past rather than move forwards, he says.

If people want to learn minority languages like Manx, that is up to them - it shouldn't be backed by government subsidy, he argues.

"To have a public policy that a certain culture or language should be preserved shows a fundamental misunderstanding. I don't see why it's in the public good to preserve Manx or Cornish or any other language for that matter." In the end, whether or not a language is viable is very simple. "If a language is one that people don't participate in, it's not a language anymore."

Wicked words

The veteran word-watcher and Times columnist Philip Howard agrees that languages are in the hands of people, not politicians. "Language is the only absolutely true democracy. It's not what professors of linguistics or academics or journalists say, but what people do. If children in the playground start using 'wicked' to mean terrific then that has a big effect."

The former Spanish dictator Franco spent decades trying to stamp out the nation's regional languages but today Catalan is stronger than ever and Basque is also popular.

And Mr Howard says politicians make a "category mistake" when they try to interfere with language, citing an experiment in Glasgow schools that he says is doomed to fail. "Offering Gaelic to children of people who don't speak it seems like a conservation of lost glories. It's very romantic to try and save a language but nonsense."

But neither is he saying that everyone should speak English. "Some people take a destructivist view and argue that everyone will soon be speaking English. But Mandarin is the most populous language in the world and Spanish the fastest growing."

There are competing forces at work that decide whether smaller languages survive, Howard argues. On the one hand globalisation will mean that many languages disappear. But some communities will always live apart, separated by sea, distance or other barriers and will therefore keep their own language. With modern communications and popular culture "you find that if enough people want to speak a language they can".

In short, there is no need for handwringing.

"Language is not a plant that rises and falls, lives and decays. It's a tool that's perfectly adapted by the people using it. Get on with living and talking."

Visit the site to view an informative video.
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BBC News Magazine. 2010. "Are dying languages worth saving?". BBC News Magazine. Posted: September 14, 2010. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11304255