General introduction on Minority and Endangered Languages.

According to the newsletter of The Foundation for Endangered Languages, "...half of the world's six thousand languages will become extinct in the next century."  Historically, languages have died out due to invasion and conquest and, more recently, extreme social and economic pressure from larger, overbearing languages and cultures.

I don't know if there is such a thing as a "natural death" of a language. In linguistic terms, languages change, they do not die unless the last speaker dies. Latin, for example, is not really dead. It has changed over the centuries into Spanish, French, Italian, and Portugese. Indeed, Latin, itself, is still widely studied and spoken by scholars and Catholic priests. In that same sense, a family generally doesn't die out. Although the individual members get old and die, the family, itself, survives. My grandfather survives in me, just as Latin survives in modern Italian. When entire families die, they are generally the victims of some natural or manmade violence --war, earthquakes, and the like. Similarly, if an entire language dies, it is generally the result of violence --invaders kill all the speakers, or force them to give up their language. That is not a "natural" death, at least in my opinion.

"Minority" and "Endangered," however, do not necessarily mean the same thing. It is possible for a minority language, confined a local area, not to be in danger of dying out. Quechua, for example, was the native language of the ancient Inca Empire in South America 500 years ago. It is, today, a thriving minority language in South America. Today, there are more native speakers of Quechua (about seven million) in South America than there were at the time of the Spanish Conquest.  And in Europe, Basque, for example, after centuries of being neglected, even persecuted, is undergoing a resurrection that will save it from extinction. Thus, "minority" is not necessarily "endangered". On the other hand, obviously, an "endangered" language is always a minority one. There are as few as a dozen speakers of some indigenous languages in the world. Most of these speakers are elderly, and even the young ones, though they may not be forced to give up their language, choose to do so in the face of the overwhelming social, economic, and practical forcs brought to bear by the large and powerful cultures that surround them.

For this project, I have chosen to write about the Navajo language. It is, in my view, one of those American indigenous tongues that is "minority," but probably not "endangered."


The Navajo language

There are more than one-thousand Native American languages in the hemisphere. Over one-hundred of are spoken in the United States and Canada, over three-hunded in Mexico and Central America, and about a thousand in South America.

The Navajo Nation is defined by its location on the Colorado Plateau, in what is now northern Arizona, New Mexico, and part of southern Utah. The Navajo have the largest land base of any U.S. Native American tribe--about 25,000 square miles, or an area the size of the state of West Virginia--and the largest population, about 250,000. Aside from their interactions in federal Indian boarding schools, the Navajo population as a whole did not come into regular contact with the English language until well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Navajo is an Athabaskan language, part of the huge Na-Déné language group with speakers spread across the subarctic from Alaska to eastern Canada, southward to the Northwest Pacific Coast, and into the Plains and the U.S. Southwest. While Navajo claims the largest number of speakers of any indigenous language in the U.S.--about 160,000--the absolute number and relative proportion of Navajo speakers have drastically declined in the past 30 years. At the same time, the number of Navajos who are monolingual English speakers has increased, from over 7,800 in 1980, to nearly 19,000 in 1990, or 15 percent of the Navajo census population over age five.

Recent reservation-wide surveys show a clear trend: Only about half of the students now entering school are speakers of Navajo. The ultimate causes of this shift toward English must be understood within the context of U.S. colonialism and native language repression. The causes of Navajo language shift include changing residence patterns and the separation of extended families associated with the transition to a wage economy; improvements in transportation that have facilitated access to and by English speakers; English telecommunications and mass media; and more generally, a gradual increase in the social, political, and economic integration of the Navajo Nation within the larger society of the USA.

While all of these factors have had an effect, their impacts might have been less were it not for the overwhelming assimilative force of a single collective experience: English-only schooling. From the 1880s to the 1960s, the U.S. government imposed a fierce English-only policy on Navajo and other indigenous students in an attempt to "blot out . . . . barbarous dialects" Stories abound of young children being kidnapped from their homes and taken by Indian agents in horse and wagon to the boarding schools. There, students faced militaristic discipline, manual labor, instruction in a trade, and abusive treatment for 'reverting' to their mother tongue.

Current trends

and an increasing effort to promote English/Navajo bilingualism. (There is even a radio station: KTNN 660 Khz from Window Rock, Az.)

Within the 1960s Civil Rights reforms and a new federal policy of tribal self-determination, Navajo community-controlled schools emerged as a primary demonstration of resistance to forced assimilation. Governed by locally elected, indigenous leaders, community-controlled schools have been at the forefront of American Indian bilingual education and a growing movement to revitalize indigenous languages and cultures. Additionally, the homepage of the National Council for Bilingual Education's (NCVE) is at


It accesses a number of other sites, one of which is the Center for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, Arizona, where a symposium on "Stabilizing Indigenous Languages"  was held recently. Here are a few excerpts from that symposium:

"...Sylvia Wadsworth addressed the first question: "Is it worth your time to learn your language?" She answered "I appreciate my Navajo language. I'm glad I learned it and can understand, read and write it. My three kids speak Navajo; they were taught by my mom and dad." Sylvia was punished for speaking Navajo, and she first thought it would slow her kids down. But she changed her mind and concluded, "Our Navajo language is who we are." She has thought of ways to teach students in Navajo. She tells them to try to think about it and it will come to them. "As long as you can freely communicate in the classroom, it's OK. I'm glad I'm one of those who's helping them. I'm proud to be a Navajo, and speak, write, and understand."

Carlos Begay responded, "The way I think about traditional language, through it I respect my elders. I have spoken Navajo from birth. I appreciate it and these sessions. I truly believe it's good. It's worth it that you're doing it for our youth and the next generation. Maybe we'll get back to traditions. Now there's graffiti, baggy pants, and caps on backwards -- that's not our people. We need to get back to tradition."

Byron Charley added, "I like maintaining my native language and the teachings in it, the songs and stories in it. It helps you understand who you are and where you come from. It gives you respect for yourself and others. You stand out in class." Malcolm Benally answered "I think the Navajo language is important. When you speak it, it creates a different reality. Language lets us seize the earth as a living vital force. We understand more. English is not that passionate and beautiful. In our prayers, it [Navajo language] directs us when we use it."

Conclusion

It is important to realize that language, though an important part  of culture, is embedded in the culture as a whole. Thus, it is possible for a third-generation Italian-American living in New York to "feel" Italian and to turn out for all the local festive parades and celebrations of ethnic identity and, yet, not be able to speak Italian. The same holds true for many other ethnic groups in the United States.  So, is it possible for a Navajo to "feel" Navajo and not speak Navajo? Clearly, yes -- as a number of the paticipants in the student panel, cited above, indicated.  The existence of a Community College, a radio station, newspapers and books, pride in their exploits in WWII, the growth of tourism in the area --all these are  signs that a sense of ethnic pride is increasing.

Whether this necessarily translates into an increase in the daily use of the Navajo language is another question. No language has ever been saved from extinction because the speakers found pleasure in preserving themselves as some sort of abstract historical curiosity or because they liked the idea of being a 'quaint' native culture. People will speak their language only if there is a reason to do so. The 100,000-strong pool of native Navajo speakers is large enough to provide raw material if there is a will within the culture not just to preserve the language, but to use it so that it becomes self-perpetuating. Many young Navajos will have to learn their own language as a foreign language if that is to happen. The Navajo language classes I stumbled across in my internet search were clearly intended to teach Navajo to the Navajos, themselves, in the hope that a certain threshold would be passed. The hope is that the language will be injected into the culture once again and, at a certain point, take off.

That might happen. On the other hand, it might not. Certainly,  Navajo teenagers are not going to give up English, the most useful language in the world, just to speak the language of their ancectors. They will have to become bilingual. (Fortunately, that is not a big problem; bilingualism is the rule rather than the exception in many places in the world, a fact that many people in the US forget.)

However, it will be, in my opinion,  difficult for young Navajos, surrounded as they are by the English-language culture of 21st-century USA,  to pull it off --that is, to make their language a meaningful part of their lives. Somewhere deep in the Amazon, there is no doubt at this very instant a native teenager wearing his baseball cap backwards, sprinkling his conversation with "OK,"  and watching CNN by satellite TV. The chances that that teenager will leave the village and move to the big city and be overwhelmed by another language and culture are pretty high. In the Four Corners, where the Navajo live, it's only a short trip to the grey glitter of the non-Navajo big cities of the American south-west.

In any event, it seems to me that if it can be done, the Navajos are good candidates to save their culture and, especially, their language. Everything I managed to find on the internet shows a sense of cultural optimism. It would help to have some galvanizing cause, something as dramatic as the religious fervor that helped revive Hebrew. What might that be? A separate Navajo state of the US? Possible, but unlikely. A separate and independent Navajo nation? Almost certainly impossible. Short of political or religious motivation, is cultural pride enough? Maybe.

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