The Eyak language of Alaska now has two aged speakers; Mandan has 6, Osage 5, Abenaki-Penobscot 20, and Iowa has 5 fluent speakers. According to counts in 1977, already 13 years ago, Coeur d'Alene had fewer than 20, Tuscarora fewer than 30, Menomini fewer than 50, Yokuts fewer than 10. On and on this sad litany goes, and by no means only for Native North America. Sirenikski Eskimo has two speakers, Ainu is perhaps extinct. Ubykh, the Northwest Caucasian language with the most consonants, 80-some, is nearly extinct, with perhaps only one remaining speaker. Here we might be accused of jumping the gun, prematurely announcing the extinction of a language, since—as I heard somewhere—two or three more speakers of Ubykh had reportedly been found. But what difference does it make in human history that a language became extinct in 1999 instead of 1989? What difference does it make if the youngest speaker is 90 or in fact 9? Only 81 years in the date of the inevitable extinction of the language, a mere moment in human history— though a crucial moment for linguists today, as we shall see.

In schools, from kindergarten through high school, the language of instruction was English. When students who had been taught in English left school, they were speaking English. When they married, they spoke English to their children. ‘Indians’ no longer spoke their native languages as their primary means of communication.

This was the perceived state of affairs in relation to the Hualapai language in the mid 1970s. Many members of the community thought that English was taking over their ancestral language and that their traditions were about to disappear. In response to this threat of rapid language decline, a long and tedious process of forming a community language team began, with the Hualapai Bilingual/Bicultural Program as its central force.

The scene is Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, the eastern half of this Central American country. It is a multilingual region where, besides Spanish, English Creole and various indigenous languages are spoken by populations of speakers ranging from tens of thousands of Miskitu (Misumalpan) to thousands of Sumu (Misumalpan) to barely two dozen Rama (Chibchan) and a mere handful of Garifuna (Arawakan).

The time is the decade of the 1980s and of the Sandinista Revolution, during which the legal, educational, and social status of these coastal languages changed through the process of establishing an autonomy statute for the region, a development that is sometimes referred to as the second Sandinista Revolution. This Autonomy project was a response to the war situation that developed on the Atlantic Coast, as both indigenous and Creole people rejected the Sandinista Revolution in its original form.

This essay will deal with a special type of center devoted to the documentation and teaching of the linguistic traditions of contemporary Native American communities. In my remarks, I will concern myself with the needs that such a center would satisfy in North America—in particular the United States, with which I am most familiar, although some of what I will have to say applies in other parts of the world, of course. While centers possessing many of the qualities I wish to champion here exist in other parts of the world, an impressive example being the Centro Linguistico Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, there is none that closely approximates this model in the United States.

Linguists working in Guatemala in recent years have had the benefit of being able to work with an increasingly linguistically sophisticated, politically aware, and culturally concerned population. Mayas have been quite forthright about informing linguists about what they believe to be the proper sort of linguistics to do. In 1985, for instance, a group of Mayas participating in the VIII Mayan Linguistics Workshop in Antigua Guatemala called on linguists ‘not to contribute to the internal division of each Mayan language, not to promote or officialize Spanish borrowings in those languages, not to marginalize speakers of Mayan languages in the investigation of their own languages, and not to monopolize or reserve for themselves linguistic methodology and knowledge’ (Cojtí Cuxil 1990:3). It was perhaps a shock to some linguists, as it was to me, to realize that good will and good relations with the individual collaborators in our past research, a dedication to sound scientific principles of linguistic research, and even instruction in literacy and linguistics on the part of many of us were not enough to avoid rather severe criticism of our role in Mayan linguistics.

Linguists typically celebrate the tension that plays between two realities of human linguistic knowledge, universality and diversity. But linguistic diversity is not something whose future can be taken for granted. Many local languages and cultures find themselves in great peril in this era, a fact well documented elsewhere in this collection.

In the following paragraphs I will be concerned with the idea that linguistic diversity is important to human intellectual life—not only in the context of scientific linguistic inquiry, but also in relation to the class of human activities belonging to the realms of culture and art.

Most Mayan languages are ‘basically’ predicate-initial, but various phrases occur before the predicate when they are focussed or topicalized. This paper assumes the framework of Chomsky 1986 and presents a phrase-structural analysis of topic and focus for three Mayan languages (Tzotzil, Jakaltek, Tz'utujil). Three distinct entities are distinguished: the focus and two types of topic, termed here ‘internal’ and ‘external’. Each is argued to occupy a distinct structural position. At the heart of the analysis is an account of intonational phrasing and the distribution of several intonational phrase clitics in Tzotzil and Jakaltek. An algorithm is proposed for deriving intonational phrase structure from surface structure. Syntactic evidence further supports the phrase-structural differences established on prosodic grounds.

This paper reports on the results of a detailed empirical study of word order correlations, based on a sample of 625 languages. The primary result is a determination of exactly what pairs of elements correlate in order with the verb and object. Some pairs of elements that have been claimed to correlate in order with the verb and object do not in fact exhibit any correlation. I argue against the Head-Dependent Theory (HDT), according to which the correlations reflect a tendency towards consistent ordering of heads and dependents. I offer an alternative account, the Branching Direction Theory (BDT), based on consistent ordering of phrasal and nonphrasal elements. According to the BDT, the word order correlations reflect a tendency for languages to be consistently right-branching or consistently left-branching.