BERKELEY, Calif. - Quirina Lima-Costillas grew up thinking the language of her Mutsun ancestors was gone, lost in the flood of disease and destruction that ravaged California Indians. With the language went identity. Other children would ask her, with the bluntness of youth, ‘What are you?” She’d tell them and get a blank stare: “what’s that?” She later stumbled across a book by a Spanish missionary that listed hundreds of Mutsun (moot-SOON) phrases. It might as well have been Greek. 

Luna-Costillas turned detective, hunting for echoes of the almost vanished dialect. The trail was pretty cold; the last fluent speaker of Mutsun died in 1930. But there were clues to be found in the archives of the University of California, Berkeley, where for nearly a century anthropologists have been recording the cultural memories of Indians who survived the disasters of colonization and the GoldRush.

Six years after she began her quest, Quirina Lima-Costillas and a small group of other Mutsuns have scraped together a nodding acquaintance with their ancient Indian language, putting together a dictionary with the help of a linguistics professor and tranlating the Dr. Seuss classic "Green Eggs and Ham" to read to their own children.

This weekend, Lima-Costillas and her fellow language detectives are gathering Berkeley to mark the 50th anniversary of the 50th anniversary of the Survery of California and Other Indian Languages, a project dedicated to saving the languages of California's past.

‘When people lose a language they lose, we all lose, a body of knowledge and a way of looking at  the world that’s really important,” says Leanne Hinton, survey director. “To the participants themselves, language is a symbol of their identity
and so it’s a symbol of survival against all odds.”

The race to save dying languages is going on across the United States. Tribes are videotaping elders and, in a few cases, children are being taught their ancient tongue in immersion programs.

In California, 85 California languages are believed to be endangered or dormant. Berkeley has targeted 50 endangered languages, running weeklong language restoration workshops every other summer for the past 10 years. The workshops offer a crash course in linguistics and match language learners with a mentor, usually a graduate student.