13.1 Technical Questions in Language Documentation

Most of our attestations of languages that are no longer transmitted intergenerationally or orally only exist in written form. The earliest audio recording that we can listen to nowadays is the so-called phonautogram of Au clair de la lune created on 9 April 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Since 1877, when Edison recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb, people have been able to record and play back sounds. The usefulness of recording equipment for documenting endangered languages was understood very quickly, and so the Passamaquoddy people living in Maine and Canada can now listen to the recordings of their language made in 1890 by Jesse Walter Fewkes. This documentation was done using technologies no longer used: wax cylinders.

Technological advances of the last few decades have transformed the language documentation processes. People are no longer likely to struggle with wax cylinders and less likely to have to deal with cassette tapes. A huge proportion of the human population has a cellphone. Most cellphones, and probably all smartphones, have some sort of an audio recording functionality. While most of them don’t yet compare to the professional quality that can be achieved using specialized digital recording devices with good quality microphones, they are more useful because they are readily at hand.

Before starting the documentation, it is a good idea to check the cellphone and especially its recording capabilities, the placement of the internal microphone (this should be considered the last resort – to be used only if there is no way of obtaining an external one), and possibilities of upgrading it. Simple and relatively cheap upgrade possibilities include buying an external microphone with a mini-jack or another appropriate connector (as more and more smartphones are moving towards USB Type-C and Lightning ports), or installing a dedicated recording application (as opposed to the one that comes preinstalled on the phone).

No matter whether one is recording on a phone or professional equipment, one quickly encounters the issue of file formats. In general, it is better to record in lossless formats (like .wav and .flac) as in this way more data is preserved and can serve for more purposes. The alternative (lossy) format is most often .mp3, which has two main advantages:

• It consumes significantly less storage space: this might be important if there isn’t likely to be more space on the recording device and no possibility to copy the files anywhere else soon.

• The second advantage of .mp3 is that one can be sure that everyone with a modern computer or cellphone is able to listen to it. The other popular format (.wav) is relatively old and can also be played back on many devices, but the files tend to become huge once the recording gets longer and might thus cause memory (RAM) problems when played.

The newer lossless format (.flac) creates smaller files, but many older devices lack the capability to play them back at all.

It is quite easy to convert a recording from a lossless format (especially .wav but also .flac) to a lossy format (.mp3) but not the other way around.

However, .mp3 also has disadvantages. One needs to keep in mind that converting .wav to .mp3 means losing sound quality and sometimes information. In the process of compressing the recording, some information gets lost and cannot be recovered. For some revitalization purposes .mp3 files are adequate because they are smaller and easier to share via the internet, but if we want high-quality, multipurpose recordings (e.g. to analyse the sounds of a language), high-definition formats are necessary. So it is recommended to record in .wav if you have the option, and convert to .mp3 if required.Footnote ¹⁰

In the end, the decision about the format is not as impactful as the quality of the recording. There are a few things that need to be kept in mind to ensure better quality. The first is to make sure that the device is actually in good condition (fully charged, with backup batteries or external powerbanks, and a well-functioning microphone). The choice of an appropriate microphone is also very important – depending on the context it might be a stereo or mono microphone of different configurations, eg. omnidirectional, cardioid, or hypercardioid. However it is good to remember the wise words of Chase Jarvis: ‘the best camera is the one that’s with you’ as here the same principle applies to microphones. If you cannot afford the perfect or even recommended microphone for the occasion, it is better to record with the device you have than to forgo recording altogether. The second is to try to eliminate background noises: maybe ask to close a window to a busy street or make sure the recorded person doesn’t have other commitments (like pre-arranged calls). If you can do it without causing discomfort to the person being recorded, consider bringing the microphone as close to them as is reasonable. The closer it will be, the better the recording quality.

Ideally the recording should be monitored through earbuds or headphones to make sure that you are actually recording what you think you are, and that the recording level is not too high nor too low. However, it is best to check first with the person being recorded if they are OK with this as it could create the impression of paying more attention to the technology than to themselves. You may want to do some practice recordings and let them listen back via earbuds or headphones to help understand the value of monitoring,

Similar concerns apply to video recording, but one also needs to think about image quality. This means choosing the best resolution (1080p is probably the best choice, with 4K being problematic to play back) as well as framing the subject, paying attention to lighting (avoiding over-exposure and underexposure), and making sure the video is stable for example by using a tripod (if possible) and by avoiding zooming.

Framing means creating compositions which are visually pleasing and appropriate to the subject (for example a wide angle for performances and rituals, and a closer one for personal interviews). It is always better to record video in landscape (horizontal), not portrait mode.

Avoiding over-exposure and underexposure is necessary because cameras try to balance the light and dark in what they are recording, so a poorly lit person on a bright background will be only a dark silhouette. If you have more time and space to set the stage for the recording, you can use a reflector, or a white sheet, out of shot to light a dark subject.

Making sure that the video is stable is easier in some cases and more difficult in others. When recording indoors one can often put the camera on a piece of furniture, which is a fast and simple option. However, it is not without disadvantages as things on furniture can fall off, or pick up noise from the furniture itself. It is not so easy outdoors and one might often want to use a tripod. These can sometimes be heavy, expensive, and unwieldy, however there are inexpensive lighter alternatives like GorillaPods, and many fold up to convenient sizes. A selfie stick can often double as a tripod (especially for a cellphone). If the video is recorded in motion (while walking, dancing, etc.), it might be a good idea to invest in a pocket gimbal, which can stabilize it.

When recording a movie resist the temptation to zoom in and out. Once you set the focus, leave it, and do not change it. In general, it is better to put the camera a good distance from the subject. This doesn’t mean that movies will only include wide shots: high resolution video can later be cropped digitally to create closer frames, so an edited finished product can include both wide framing and close ups.

Because of the need to place the camera away from the subject you might run into the problem of reduced audio recording quality – after all the microphone should be as close as possible to the people speaking, which stands in opposition to the need to place the camera away from the subject. Moreover, inbuilt camera microphones do not measure up to the standards of external microphones. Once again, it is a good idea to use an external microphone whenever it is possible. You can also record audio separately on a recorder or cellphone using a microphone near the people speaking. This can be combined with the video later to replace any poor audio from the camera itself.

Taking all the above points into consideration, it is often better to have someone else to help with recording. This isn’t so crucial in the case of audio, which often only requires starting the recording device and periodically checking if it still works. However, when a second person helps you with an audio recording, they can also monitor it using ear buds or headphones and thus ensure that not only it is working but also that the level is correct. Video requires devoting more attention to filming, so it is easy to become distracted from the topic of conversation, which might be offensive to the person who is being recorded and waste their time. Therefore, the help of another person or two with the camera, lighting, and recording might be very useful. Younger members of the community may be interested in getting involved in your project and can be trained to help with these things.

Documentary materials are in general very valuable, and safeguarding is important. This is done most effectively through multiple backups – copies of data created to protect it from accidental destruction. The golden rule is 3:2:1 ‒ always keeping three backups. Two of those backups should use different media or ways of storing (for example having 2 hard drives and a flash drive or a CD/DVD). Each way of storing data has its problems and thus your files should be properly stored and periodically checked, e.g. by recovering sample backup files and making sure they work properly. Hard drives (HDDs) can lose data if they are demagnetized. Disks (CDs and DVDs) require an optical drive and special software, and can fail over time. Even the newest solid-state drives (SSDs) can suddenly fail unaccountably. This is precisely why we recommend storing in at least 2 different ways and checking them periodically – to reduce the likelihood of all backups failing at once, and to restore any missing ones.

At least one backup should be kept separately from the others – in a different place (a different room, or even better, building) or in the cloud (on a dedicated Internet server). ‘Free’ cloud storage (that is available without having to pay for it) is available from many providers (like Google, Microsoft – OneDrive, Dropbox, mega, and many others) but using it always means that the data is uploaded to a corporation’s server, which might be an ethical problem for many people or a data privacy issue if the server is outside the user’s country, e.g. there are issues with the GDPR if cloud storage is in the USA. Still, these providers offer a lot of space without having to spend any money. However, no matter what kind of backup one chooses, it is important to do so. In general, it is recommended to do a backup at least every week, but when conducting fieldwork, it is best done whenever time permits – preferably every day.

You should also consider archiving important materials (audio, video, photos, text, computer files) to ensure long-term storage and availability. Archiving requires working with a trusted repository and involves selecting and editing the materials and describing them using metadata, e.g. who is in the recording, where it was made, what languages are being used. More information about archiving for endangered languages is available from www.delaman.org.

13.2 MILPA (Mexican Indigenous Language Promotion and Advocacy): A Community-Centered Linguistic Collaboration Supporting Indigenous Mexican Languages in California

In response to the social and linguistic challenges faced by Ventura County’s diasporic Indígena community (see Capsule 6.2), the Mixteco/Indígena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) has teamed up with linguists from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to create programs that foster language maintenance, multiliteracy, social justice, and Indígena pride. We refer to these activities collectively as the Mexican Indigenous Language Promotion and Advocacy project (MILPA).

MILPA brings together methods from sociocultural linguistics and documentary linguistics to carry out a range of community-based activities, some of which we outline in this capsule:

1. (i) Tu’un Savi (Mixtec) literacy classes;

2. (ii) Collaborative documentation of multiple Mixtec varieties;

3. (iii) College-level courses on language, culture, and society offered to Indígena youth;

4. (iv) A community language survey that explores language use and attitudes;

5. (v) The creation of Indigenous language materials for community use.

Community members gain technical training while collaboratively documenting their particular language varieties in UCSB’s year-long graduate field methods course, and from there they go on to lead MILPA programs while advancing their own language-related goals (see Capsule 11.1).

In 2015, MICOP extended an invitation to UCSB linguists to help provide training to community members interested in becoming Indigenous language literacy instructors. The team launched the program Tu’un Savi: Aprendo a Leer y Escribir en mi Lengua (‘I Learn to Read and Write in my Language’). Ten Indigenous students, UCSB graduate students, and university teachers participated in an online training course offered by María Gloria Santos Hernández of INEA (the Mexican National Institute for the Education of Adults). Out of the ten students, Gabriel Mendoza and Griselda Reyes Basurto were chosen to lead the first such pilot Indigenous language literacy course outside of Mexico, focusing on the Mixtec variety spoken by the greatest number of Ventura County’s Indígena population: San Martín Peras Mixtec. Course outcomes included basic vocabulary documentation and analysis of the sound system, or phonology (including tone), to enable the development of a writing system (orthography) (see Chapter 14), and revision of the course materials to match the San Martín Peras variety.

In 2017, the team continued to offer the beginning literacy course and began offering biweekly workshops to document and develop writing systems for other Mixtec varieties. The team works collectively on shared online spreadsheets to compile a multivariety Mixtec–Spanish–English dictionary, sheets for each variety that organize words by tonal melodies, a comparative verb database, and literacy primers.

MILPA offers a yearly course on language, culture, and society for MICOP’s Tequio Indígena youth activist group as part of UCSB’s School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society program (SKILLS). This course is facilitated by UCSB graduate students and the Tequio Youth Coordinator, and high school and community college students earn college credit at California Lutheran University for their participation. Young people design and carry out ethnographic and linguistic research and community action projects that have resulted in the creation of a documentary film about Indígena youth identity, multilingual podcasts, poetry, online videos, and social media engagement written in Indigenous languages.

The first survey of Indigenous language use, language attitudes, and linguistic diversity among Ventura County’s Indígena population is being carried out by community leaders of the MILPA project with support from UCSB linguists. The survey explores community members’ and their families’ multilingual practices, linguistic challenges, and language attitudes, to better understand if and how Indigenous languages are being maintained, lost, or discriminated against in the community. In this way, we can get a clearer picture of language use and linguistic diversity among Ventura County’s Indígena population that can inform initiatives that foster language maintenance and justice.

The multivariety language documentation workshops, Tequio SKILLS courses, and UCSB field methods courses produce Indigenous language materials for expanding domains of language use and visibility in the community. Other examples of MILPA products include trilingual story books, coloring pages, card games, lotería (Bingo) games, vocabulary activities, and online language pedagogy activities that now have a Mixtec interface. Multimedia and multivariety materials foster language use and Indígena pride in the face of language shift and the challenges experienced by a diverse and marginalized community.

MILPA offers one model of community-based and multifaceted language maintenance and advocacy work. While designed to meet the various needs of this diverse and multilingual diasporic community, aspects of the project may be applicable for similar projects elsewhere.

13.3 Developing Innovative Models for Fieldwork and Linguistic Documentation: ENGHUM Experience in Hałcnów, Poland

Hałcnów, called Alzen in standard German and Alza in a local linguistic variety, was formerly a separate village. It now belongs to the city of Bielsko-Biała in southern Poland. Until the end of the World War II it was predominantly German; however, its inhabitants spoke Alznerish, a variety which is scarcely mutually intelligible with High German. Although most of the Halcnovians were not politically connected to Nazism, after the end of the war they suffered from severe persecution. The majority were either killed, banished to the Soviet Union, or resettled to Germany. The communist regime tried to erase all ‘signs of Germanness’ from public and private spaces. As a consequence, Alznerish also became invisible. When the political situation in Poland changed and post-war anti-German sentiment declined, most scholars supposed that it was too late to find any native speakers of the language. The fieldwork conducted in 2013 by the scholars from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań proved that they were wrong.

During the 2016 ENGHUM field school (see Capsule 12.2) in the nearby town of Wilamowice (where another endangered language is spoken – see Capsule 6.1), the major task of one of working groups was to document the linguistic and cultural heritage of Hałcnów. A multiethnic group consisting of seven people developed an innovative methodological approach to the problem. In the first phase of the fieldwork they focused on tracing the (hidden) elements of the linguistic landscape of Hałcnów. These actions were an attempt to discover material culture connected with Alznerish, but they also attempted to establish whether the German past of the village is now seen as an integral part of local heritage.

In the second part of the fieldwork the group was divided. While the first sub-group started to meet the native speakers and conducted unstructured conversations in Alznerish, German, and Polish, or some elicitation in Alznerish, the second group attempted to meet and talk to the most socially prominent people in Hałcnów: the priest, teachers, local historians, and activists. Except for the overt aim of this work – gaining knowledge on current ideologies and attitudes towards the language, asking about some other people who may know Alznerish, there was also another essential purpose for the fieldwork. In Poland researchers enjoy high respect in society. Moreover, as a result of the isolation of Poland in the communist period, foreigners from beyond the Iron Curtain are treated with esteem, especially outside big urban centres. Taking this into account, the interest of foreign scholars in Alznerish inevitably increased the prestige of the local linguistic variety. It was an indirect and non-intrusive way to change linguistic ideologies. The work of this group led to some unexpected discoveries. It appeared that local school students created a short glossary of the Polish variety used in Hałcnów, which is a testimony of emergence of a new linguistic community. What is of even greater importance, a previously unknown fluent speaker of Alznerish was identified. In addition, the fact that we were the first visitors ever to show interest in the villagers’ experiences meant that they felt able to share with us some previously unheard personal accounts of suffering in the post-war period.

In the third stage, the group acted together again. A meeting was organized of all Alznerish speakers. Strikingly, despite being neighbours, in some cases they did not know about one another’s skills in their mother tongue. Their joy from this discovery was noticeable. It has to be admitted that the scholars did not know Alznerish, but they could communicate in German or Polish. Very soon it turned out that using the latter language was more beneficial. When Halcnovians were asked questions in German, they replied in German, while the ‘distance’ between Polish and Alznerish was big enough to prevent constant code switching. The conversation concerned the pre-war time in the village and its ‘ethnography’. Currently, it is perhaps the only domain where Alznerish can be used. It was also interesting to find that the villagers could only use the past tense to talk about their experiences.

The last phase of research activities took place in Wilamowice. Halcnovians were asked to participate in an event summarizing the field school. They were treated as special guests and received an opportunity to speak publicly in their language. It was perhaps the first time after the end of the World War II, when Alznerish was not only used publicly without fear, but also attracted positive media attention.

The described pilot study is an innovative methodological proposal for short-term studies. It was focused on documentation of the language, networking of its users and either external or internal promotion of Alznerish. The combination of these three factors may give some hope that the effects of the study will be extended in time.

14.1 Orthographies and Ideologies

Very often, language communities and activists want to make their language visible through developing a script, writing system, orthography, individual letters or type fonts. The choices involved in deciding the graphic layout make language ideologies tangible. Developing a written form (graphization) of a language (variety) not only involves the selection of an appropriate orthography, but also making decisions concerning cultural, religious, political and historical matters.

Ideological factors are therefore fundamental when considering how to write minority languages. However, it is always the community who should have the decisive voice when adopting script, writing system and orthography. Of course, there are often disagreements within a community on writing and/or orthography.

Many minorities use writing to symbolically mark their territory, using public signs to mark the names of settlements, municipalities or other places within the area of a dominant language. Sometimes the languages used in the signs are perceived as rival or competing against each other – occasionally this also applies to rival orthographies for the same ‘language’ (e.g. Provençal/Occitan orthographies in southern France, or ‘standard’ vs. ‘dialectal’ forms, e.g. in Italian Lombardy, Piedmont or Veneto). Place names may be written in two or more languages or writing systems, and it is quite common for a name in one language to be removed, altered or painted over as a visible sign of ethno-linguistic conflict, an example being a letter V in an Anglicized place-name in Wales replaced by an F.

Traditionally, a script or graphic layout has been ideologically related to culture, and even more often with religion. Many people spontaneously associate the Cyrillic script with the Christian Eastern Orthodoxy, Arabic with Islamic tradition, Hebrew with Judaism, Devanagari with Hinduism and Chinese characters with the East Asian cultural sphere. For a long time, the Latin script was linked to the Western European tradition and Western Christianity. In regions of Europe where Protestant and Catholic traditions rivaled each other, the visible factor used to differentiate them was a type font: protestant writings adopted Blackletter or Gothic script, while Catholic publications used Antiqua typeface.

Throughout history, scripts have been designed specifically for individual languages – examples being the Georgian scripts (ქართული დამწერლობა): Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri, and Mkhedruli, the Armenian Հայերենի այբուբեն / Hayereni aybuben for Armenian, the Korean 한글 / Hangul, or the syllabaries ひらがな/ Hiragana and カタカナ/ Katakana for Japanese. These and other ‘national’ scripts became carriers and symbols of various ‘nation-state’ ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The same nation-state ideologies were also behind the adoption or imposition of dominant scripts as writing systems for minority languages (no matter whether they were linguistically related or not), e.g. in Georgia for Abkhazian, Ossetian, Svan, Megrelian, or in Japan for Ainu or Ryūkyūan.

The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי / Alefbet ‘Ivri ) has served as a marker of Jewishness, and as such has been applied to most of the Jewish languages spoken all over the world (Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, and many others). The same alphabet was originally adopted by the Karaims, a Turkic people of Judaic religious tradition. In the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, the Karaim communities in Lithuania and Poland decided to switch from Hebrew to Latin script in order to visually mark their separation from Jewish ethnicity. Later, Karaims under Soviet rule had to adopt a Russian Cyrillic-based orthography. Even some Yiddish speakers in the same period thought about switching from the Hebrew script to the Polish Latin-based writing system. From a contemporary educational perspective, it might be easier to learn using the same script as the dominant education system, although it can also encourage faster language shift. The majority of world’s languages have not been recorded in writing and there are fewer scripts and writing systems than language varieties in the world. Furthermore, many language communities have made changes to their orthographies or individual graphemes (e.g. Vietnamese and Turkish switching to Latin script).

Any language or language variety can be written with any writing system or script, although e.g. arguably syllabaries are more suitable for languages with Consonant+Vowel syllables. However, there are many factors involved in devising or adapting a writing system or orthography, and these must be considered in order for an orthography to be effective. The process is more complex than is commonly realized.

Here are some key factors to be taken into consideration when designing effective orthographies:

1. (1) Governmental, administrative and legal policies, obligations and restrictions, which must be considered when working on community-driven (bottom-up or grassroots) projects. For example, in Ghana all writing systems have to use the national orthographical conventions.Footnote ²

2. (2) Cultural or religious traditions, e.g. ease of access to earlier written materials such as pre-Conquest Central American manuscripts, visual appearance (i.e. symbolic meaning of individual graphemes), the values attached to a script or typeface (e.g. the close relationship between Arabic script and Islam).

3. (3) Linguistic factors, including sound-grapheme or meaning-grapheme correspondence (according to the script type), or how to decide where word breaks come.

4. (4) Educational and social factors, including literacy issues and ease of learning, access to the learning of additional language.

5. (5) Sociolinguistic aspects – including language ideologies, attitudes, how to choose the ‘standard’ variety and its applicability to other varieties of the language in question.

6. (6) Need and importance of written language documentation for the community.

Inventing a script is one way that a community can try to create a distinct identity. Sometimes creating and developing a uniquely new script is the most accepted way to develop and promote social literacy within a language community. One such case is the well-documented Indigenous script of N’ko in West Africa. The N’ko ‘social orthography’ has successfully competed against other older writing systems that have been better propagated in the colonial and national literacy education programs. N’ko’s popularity results from the script’s strong linguistic and cultural relevance to the Mande communities and their Indigenous knowledge.

Some minority language communities prefer to use a special font (such as the contemporary Basque Harri / Vasca or the historical Gaelic script for the Celtic languages), or a unique, recognizable type style (e.g. mixed-case oblique Irish vs. capital lettered English on road signs in the Republic of Ireland). In such cases, the graphic features of the script became symbolically relevant, acting as distinctive markers of the linguistic landscape. On the other hand, some members of the community might object to such ‘ethnic fonts’ as markers of folklorization or archaization.

If a language community uses the same script as the surrounding dominant language(s), individual graphemes (e.g. particular letters in alphabets) or even individual diacritic signs, i.e. additional graphic marks of letters, might become ideological carriers and visible indices of identity. Examples of the latter include, e.g.

• the letters ë ė ȧ are, respectively, considered the most Kashubian, most Lithuanian, and most Wymysiöeryś (all three are minority/regional languages in Poland);

• the letter q marks plurals in Võro (or Southern Estonian – an unrecognized regional language in Estonia), while Standard Estonian uses d for the same function;

• the letter ō is used in some orthographies of Latgalian (a regional language in Latvia), but was officially outlawed by the Latvian language authorities for not corresponding to the general Latvian graphic tradition;

• the letter ґ was used traditionally in Ukrainian orthography, but forbidden by the Soviet orthographic reforms in the 1930s, as ‘too much Western and too little Soviet’;

• the letters q, w and x were forbidden by Turkish law since 1928, when Turkey changed its alphabet from an Arabic-based system to a Latin one. The change was intended to standardize Turkish spelling and improve literacy. However, the reform also had a political aim: assimilating Turkey’s minorities, chiefly the Kurds. For many years, any Kurdish person whose name contained a Q, W or X, for example, could not have those letters included on their official documents. In the 2000s, Kurdish language activists launched a ‘Q-X-W’ campaign, which led to the abolishment of the ban in 2013.

14.2 Writing Your Language: The Case of Wymysiöeryś

When I was ten I became aware of a big threat to my language, Wymysiöeryś, and so I wanted to protect it. The problem was, I did not know how to do it. Somebody told me that the more recordings and texts there are of a language the better. The first thing I did was to record my grandma and her friends speaking Wymysiöeryś. But I knew that my recordings should include more literary forms of the language. As a child I had no access to Biesik’s poetry. Florian Biesik (1850–1926) is a Wymysiöeryś poet who spent most of his life in Trieste. I knew the local songs and oral poetry, but there were very few texts which I could read, as all of them were written in various orthographies.

I had the good fortune to meet Józef Gara fum Tołer, who was the only person publishing poems in Wymysiöeryś at that time. He taught me how to use his orthography and he checked my poems for me. Another person who helped me with my first poems was Ingeborg Matzner-Danek: she translated some poems from the Bielitz-Bialaer variant of German into Wymysiöeryś.

The goal of these first texts that I wrote was language documentation. Of course, this documentation was the work of an eleven-year-old child and it was not like the documentation carried out by professionals. The most important part of the work was the inclusion of a variety of themes and grammatical forms, but I was afraid of inventing new words. Inventing new words is always a political or ideological decision: should it be a word taken from a foreign language like Polish, German, English, or maybe a new word created by myself? Those texts from when I was child are now sometimes used as teaching materials, but they are mostly kept ‘in the drawer’.

Then, there was a request for Wymysiöeryś texts from the local Dance Group ‘Wilamowice’: sometimes they needed a translation of a Polish song that they sung, sometimes I would tell them a poem or some greetings in rhyme for an important person and sometimes I would invent a new song for a special occasion. I often still do this.

Then I started writing some ‘bigger’ texts, including novels and poems. But I often heard people say: ‘Your language is not really a language. We Poles have a large and varied literature with many poets, such as Mickiewicz etc.’ I was angry about this, because the goal of these statements was to humiliate speakers of Wymysiöeryś. So I decided to change this and I wrote many poems and prose in different genres. When I was sixteen, one of the stories I wrote was called S’ława fum Wilhelm (‘The life of Wilhelm’). It recounted the genesis of Wymysoü-Wilamowice and was printed by the Association ‘Wilamowianie’. However, for me the most important texts are those that I wrote for the Dance Group because they are the texts that are most ‘alive’: they are sung by the Dance Group as ‘old Wymysiöeryś songs’ and nobody remembers that I am the author. The Christmas carols I translated from Polish to Wymysiöeryś are sung alongside their Polish equivalents by children going from house to house at Christmas time. For me it is beautiful that my texts, of whose quality I was so anxious, are now a part of the Vilamovian oral poetry collection. I also find it beautiful that, for Vilamovians, I am equal with tens of authors whose names are not known anymore, but whose texts have been sung for hundreds of years.

The second piece of luck I have had is that my students started writing their own texts. I must say, when I was being taught by Inga-Müm and Jüza-Feter, I never dreamt about having my own pupils in the future. As I wrote above, I was previously afraid of inventing new words which could be used for new things that I wanted to include in teaching materials that I created. Now, after the two successes that I have written about, I feel authorized to do so.

14.3 Indigenous Research, Methodology and Writing

The books and articles that have been written recently on the topic of Indigenous research and methodology have two things in common. First, they are written in dominant languages, such as English and Spanish, rather than in the Indigenous languages themselves. Second, they are largely theoretical; in other words, they talk about what Indigenous research and methodology should look like and what its political function should be, but they rarely actually do it. At the Instituto de docencia e investigación etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ, see Capsule 8.5) we have been conducting curriculum development and research in the area of Nahuatl language and culture for the past seventeen years, and we have done it monolingually, in Nahuatl. We work on the premise that for research and methodology to be considered ‘Indigenous’, it should be performed from within the unique worldview and cognitive structures of each specific culture. And these can best be accessed, understood, developed and expressed through each culture’s language. Here are four examples of how we perform research at IDIEZ.

Example 1: During the course of writing Tlahtolxitlauhcayotl, Chicontepec, Veracruz, our monolingual dictionary of Modern Huastecan Nahuatl, we created a tremendous amount of neologisms for grammatical terminology. But we never simply translate terminology from European languages, as is common with the Mexican bilingual school system. We always begin with a concept, discuss it collectively in Nahuatl, and when we understand what we want to express, we use the morphological resources of Nahuatl to create a term. For example, we took the verb tocaxtia ‘to name something’ and turned it into a gerund tlatocaxtiliztli ‘the act of providing something with a name’. This is the neologism we use to express the concept of ‘noun’. Nahuatl nouns have subjects; rather than a simple label, they constitute a process for providing a subject with a name.

Example 2: At a conference in Chihuahua in 2016, a panel of native speakers of different Uto-Aztecan languages gave talks in Spanish about colour terminology in their culture. During the question and answer session, I explained that Modern Huastecan Nahuatl, also a Uto-Aztecan language, doesn’t employ the concept of colour; rather it uses ixnezcayotl ‘something’s surface appearance’, which includes colours, but also such things as stripes, polka dots, stains, and certain types of visible textures. The panel participants responded that their languages worked in the same ways, but they had just uncritically assumed that the Western concept of colour was universal.

Example 3: Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz wrote his master’s thesis in Nahuatl on the topic of corn, at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in 2016. When we were discussing how to organize his work, I suggested a typical Western model with chapters on land, planting methods, tools and deities, etc. But Eduardo responded that as an Indigenous person this didn’t make sense to him at all. He proposed chapters on each one of the ceremonies that comprised the yearly agriculture cycle, with each chapter discussing the aspects of land, planting methods and tools, deities, etc., that it employed. He chose to focus on the interrelation of his topics, rather than to compartmentalize them.

During five hundred years of contact with Europe, Nahuas have never been purists: they have adopted foreign things that are useful and ignored those that are not. At IDIEZ we do not seek to discard all foreign ways of perception and principles of organization. Rather we conduct research to discover what in today’s Nahuatl culture is native and what is of foreign origin, so that native speakers can make informed decisions about how they wish to generate and organize knowledge and how they write about their culture in their own language.

15.1 Ka Hoʻōla ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi I O Nā Kula: Hawaiian Language Revitalization through Schooling

Hawaiian revitalization efforts currently focus on Hawaiian-medium education as an effective framework to reverse the demise of the marginalized Indigenous Hawaiian language and cultural identity. Using the Native Hawaiian language as the medium of education began with the founding of the ʻAha Pūnana Leo in 1983, a nonprofit education organization that established its first preschools in 1984–1985 for children aged three to five. These schools continue until today and are conducted five days a week throughout the school year, from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM, where Hawaiian is the only language heard while education takes place. The ʻAha Pūnana Leo preschool children served as the impetus for the first HawaiʻiFootnote ²⁴ Department of Education’s Hawaiian Language Immersion Program, started in 1987. Currently there are twenty-four Hawaiian immersion school sites in the Hawaiian Islands. In 2019 the Hawaiʻi public schools Hawaiian immersion program graduated its twentieth consecutive preschool (three to five years old) through twelfth grade high school (sixteen to seventeen years old), or P-12 Hawaiian immersion class since the first such Hawaiian immersion graduation cycle was achieved in 1999.

The term ‘Hawaiian immersion’ is now moving into ‘Hawaiian-medium’ education, where Hawaiʻi’s Indigenous language is more than just a ‘novel’ way of ‘immersing’ a child in a foreign language separate from a country’s mainstream language to conduct a child’s education. Hawaiian medium education utilizes the endangered, unconventional Native Hawaiian language totally as the language of instruction, interweaving the Indigenous Hawaiian cultural identity and rendering the Hawaiian language as the Hawaiian foundation to engage the world. This Hawaiian medium education philosophy establishes its own conventions of education, and in the case of Hawaiʻi, also achieving the educational standards of a mainstream English society.Footnote ²⁵

Currently, the Hawaiian Language College, Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani, of the University of Hawaiʻi at the Hilo campus, serves as the major source for Hawaiian medium teacher certification and the College’s Hale Kuamoʻo Hawaiian Language Center develops Hawaiian medium curriculum resources for use in schools. The Hawaiian Language College offers a Bachelor’s degree in Hawaiian language as well as Master’s degrees in Hawaiian language and the state’s first Doctorate degree for the Revitalization of Hawaiian and Indigenous Language and Culture. These graduate degrees represent the first graduate degrees to be offered in the USA for any Indigenous language. So as Hawaiʻi now witnesses the death of its very last native speakers and the success of its Hawaiian immersion and Hawaiian medium P-12 programs, it is imperative that the College of Hawaiian Language continues to generate highly fluent second language speakers of Hawaiian focused on Hawaiian medium tertiary education.

Since the establishment of the ʻAha Pūnana Leo in 1983 for Hawaiʻi’s first Hawaiian language-medium Pūnana Leo preschools, thirty-six years of advancement in Hawaiian language-medium preschool to twelfth grade education into the public school system has resulted in unprecedented outcomes for Hawaiʻi. A standard of 100 percent high school graduation and 80 percent college entry rate for Hawaiian medium education students has been attained. These positive outcomes have uplifted the confidence and pride of a colonized minority Native population and have instilled achievable goals for the survival of the Hawaiian language and culture in its own homeland. Perhaps more significant has been the creation of highly fluent second language speaking parents who are now raising the new generation of Hawaiian first language speakers from the home. This sets the stage for further developments in formal Hawaiian-medium education that will continue to reach into the economic, social, legal, and political structures of society to regain the Hawaiian language and cultural identity’s rightful place in its own Native land while moving into the wider world.

15.2 Kristang Language Revitalization in Singapore under the Kodrah Kristang Initiative, 2016–Present

Kristang is an endangered Portuguese creole, once spoken in various forms across Southeast Asia from the seventeenth century. Today, it is spoken mostly by older speakers in Melaka, Malaysia, where the language arose after the Portuguese conquest of the city in 1511, and Singapore, whose Kristang community (today known as Portuguese-Eurasians) developed in the early nineteenth century following the establishment of a British trading outpost in 1819. The dominance of the English language in colonial and then independent Singapore, together with the perception of Kristang as ‘patois Portuguese’, ensured that by the late twentieth century, knowledge of the language’s very existence in Singapore was almost forgotten, even by younger Portuguese-Eurasians. Intergenerational transmission most likely ceased by the late 1960s, and the language is not taught in schools, or used in media or publications. As a result, it was estimated that, in 2015, less than 100 speakers of Kristang remained in Singapore.

Kodrah Kristang (‘Awaken, Kristang’) is a youth-led grassroots revitalization movement that started in March 2016 with a free pilot class for adult learners in Kristang following a year of documentation in Singapore. This first class was a collaboration between an older speaker involved in documentation who wanted the language preserved, and a younger Kristang learner who led the documentation effort. Successive rounds of this class were then developed into a full structured 160-hour curriculum based on Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based Language Teaching principles (for more details see below). A thirty-year revitalization plan for the language, developed in 2016 at the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, also informed the development of the curriculum. This plan is divided into five phases: Prendeh (‘Learning’: 2016–2017), Abrasah (‘Embracing’: 2017–2018), Alkansah (‘Achieving’: 2018–2021), Kriseh (‘Increasing’: 2021–2035), and Subih (‘Elevating’: 2035–2045). Ultimately, the plan seeks to redevelop space for Kristang in the Singaporean home, whether Portuguese-Eurasian or otherwise, and invite, encourage, and sustain community ownership in the revitalization of the language.

The Kodrah Kristang initiative focuses on outreach and collaboration, building a broad base of contacts while maintaining a strong focus on attracting young people and ensuring that the effort is grassroots/community-oriented and low-cost. Kodrah’s youth-led core team is multiethnic, with only two out of five of the present team being of Portuguese-Eurasian descent. Classes are open to anyone of any ethnicity, not just Portuguese-Eurasians. This is due to the initiative’s urban context, the small size of the Portuguese-Eurasian community (about 0.4 percent of the population, or 16,000 individuals), and strong sensitivities in Singaporean society and the Singapore Eurasian community about language and race. The core team continues to work with remaining Kristang speakers to deliver lessons, with a (younger) core team member leading classes from the front and one or more Kristang speakers usually present among the students to provide feedback and support. Lessons are structured almost entirely around games and interactive activities to facilitate the growth of a new Kristang-speaking community founded on strong interpersonal relationships.

All classes and class-related materials are free, as the initiative has cultivated a system of reusable long-term capital and strong relationships with venue partners to reduce financial barriers to long-term sustainability. Broadly speaking, most class activities make use of common household items and games (e.g. poker cards, dice, rough paper) that cost little and can be reused as long-term capital. Slides are uploaded online so printing is left to the individual learner’s discretion. The team makes use of a small amount of funds accumulated from the Kristang Language Festival in 2017 (see below) and sales of Kristang dictionaries and games fund the printing of some worksheets and purchasing of long-term capital such as dice and cards. Meanwhile the current Core Team are all registered People’s Association (PA) trainers in Singapore, which allows them to run classes at any community center in Singapore for a very minimal fee.

As of May 2019, about 280 individuals, including 15 children of various ages, have completed the entry-level Kodrah 1A course and the associated ALKAS assessment, a diagnostic tool developed to determine learners’ progress after two modules. Thirty students from the pioneer group in July 2016 completed the first round of highest-level 4A and 4B courses in November 2018. Meanwhile wider public outreach has been extensive, with the initiative nominated for the prestigious Singapore President’s Volunteer and Philanthropy Award in 2017 and 2018, for demonstrating Kampong Spirit. Other initiatives include a pilot children’s class in July 2017 and the successful launch of the first Kristang Language Festival, held in May 2017 and attended by over 1,400 individuals. A number of Kodrah students have independently initiated projects of their own featuring Kristang, including a film (Nina Boboi), a graphic novel (Boka di Stori), a children’s book series, and a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG). These are not part of the revitalization plan but have seen significant support from both the Eurasian community and wider Singaporean society; Nina Boboi featured on the online streaming service Toggle and the graphic novel Boka di Stori was funded by a Yale-NUS Futures of Our Pasts grant.

15.3 Teaching and Learning of Wymysiöeryś

As a child I was obsessed with thinking about what would happen if the native speakers of my language died out. When I was ten, the youngest of them were over seventy years old, so I realized that it would unfortunately come fast. Then I would be alone in Wilamowice as if in a fremd (foreign) place.

I knew that the only way to change this situation was to teach my friends. At that time, they would rather tease me than show an interest in learning Wymysiöeryś. As I was thinking about how to deal with it, I discovered that lessons in Wymysiöeryś were to be organized at the school, led by an old Vilamovian – Józef Gara fum Tołer. He taught a few children, but unfortunately, because of his age (he was about eighty), he could not do it for long. Then, after two years, the lessons stopped. It was the year 2006. I thought that may be the time spent teaching children, who do not learn much, could be better spent recording the last living native speakers and undertaking language documentation.

Then, in 2011, I decided to start teaching the language. I thought about focusing on documentation, but I realized that I did not want to feel guilty that I kept the new generation of speakers from knowing the old native speakers. The first group were children from the Dance Group ‘Wilamowice’, then came their friends and I had to organize a couple of groups at different levels. They did their homework with the Wymysiöeryś native speakers: they helped them with housework while speaking Wymysiöeryś together. The old people are often alone, so they were very happy to have guests who were young and interested in their language and in their life stories.

There were years when I had about twelve groups and I taught about twenty-four hours per week. In 2011 I was eighteen, so my workload included preparation for the secondary school exit exams and then university, where I also had many exams. My parents did not like that I would spend more time teaching than learning and I failed my university exams twice. For them and for some friends of mine it was a big tragedy and they could not understand why I kept teaching children and teens who would sometimes stop learning or not treat me well: what if nobody wanted to continue? But I knew that it was the price and the risk that we as Indigenous people take every day. That was not the only decision that I took in 2011. I was thinking every day that while there were many children here who stopped learning, there were also many academics who abandoned their activities in Wilamowice, because they felt dissatisfied with their effectiveness. For example, some people wanted to start projects, but then they realized that their work would remain unknown, or that there are too few native speakers, or that young people do not speak in the same way as before World War II, or that this town is too small for them and they cannot spend a couple of months here because of the lack of entertainment. So why should I believe more in scholars than in my pupils?

There were many moments when I was in doubt, but now, I see my students writing poems and songs, playing in theatrical performances in Wymysiöeryś, teaching other children, speaking Wymysiöeryś with each other, using it on Facebook and creating websites about Wymysiöeryś. I can confirm for people who are thinking about taking a similar decision, that I do not regret it. I remember all the moments of doubt, but I know that this is the price that we, as locals, have to pay and nobody can do it for us. We are grateful for help from the universities in Warsaw and Poznan in preparing teaching materials and negotiating with local authorities, but organizing things on an everyday basis, teaching and as looking for new students, are all up to us.

15.4 Immersive Łemko Ethnophilology

Łemko ethnophilology was a degree course at the Pedagogical University of Kraków between 2001 and 2017. This program was needed because the Lemko training had been available only at the level of primary and high school and there was not space to prepare Łemko teachers and Łemko intelligentsia. It was closed because of standardized majority criteria for university programs: The university authorities decided there were not enough participants, whereas the recruitment rules were not adjusted to the specific situation of an ethnic minority. It was the only higher education course in Poland designed to prepare students for using the Łemko language in the public spaces and domains where minority languages are used in Poland, i.e. teaching, journalism, cultural animation, social work, research.

Students learned through common creative activities. During group and individual work they created texts in Łemko. These are published in a special section of Łemko newspapers and include book reviews as well as reports about Łemko events. The students participated not only in classes but also in journalism and music workshops. They also took part in linguistic and cultural practices in various places where Łemkos live and learn. This means that the development of their Łemko training was also shaped by the local socio-political and cultural life of this minority community. Students also had teaching practice in schools where Łemko is taught and during summer camps for Łemko youth. The most important part of these activities was the emphasis on their social meaning and social utility. The positive, family-like emotions they felt while learning creatively in Łemko-language situations reinforced their language awareness and learning.

A very important achievement of this program was the originality of the teaching method, which meets the needs of members of minority language communities and cultures. The main feature of this method was full immersion from the very start. It was possible because the lecturers were native users of Łemko who uphold Łemko customs in their private and social lives. Those students who were brought up knowing the Łemko language and culture provided important support for new speakers. Their innate knowledge of the domains of language and culture had positive impact on all the students – including those who had never had any contact with Łemko before. Working in such a diverse group of people is most effective as it shapes immersion dynamically and creates a special communicative and emotional sensitivity. If there are no native speakers in the group (and it happens), contact with the broadest possible range of students and Łemko youth is needed. This should happen in an environment where cultural and linguistic patterns of behavior are continued. Such emerging relationships among students bring about good results in the domains of information and emotion (and this is a priority when it comes to minority languages) as they motivate learning through approval – like in family relations. Students who aren’t Łemkos are symbolically introduced into the family as they obtain their Łemko names and acquire the community language. This makes them feel special but also creates an obligation for them with regard to the language and its transmission. Students who are native speakers of Łemko are put in the position of teachers and supervisors. They also become aware of the mechanisms how the language is passed down in family environment along a number of contexts of its use and what is special about it. All this helps them have the confidence to use it in public spaces. The alumni of the Łemko ethnophilology course are among the most engaged revitalizers of the Łemko language and traditions (Figure 15.4.1).

Figure 15.4.1 A presentation of Łemko books by Olena Duć-Fajfer, the founder of the Łemko philology, and Petro Murianka, a Łemko poet, writer, and teacher.

Photo by Jarosław Mazur

15.5 Culture Place-Based Language Basketry Curriculum at the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community

Place-based learning has emerged in Indigenous communities as a promising approach for language learning, revitalization, and maintenance. Place-based education has links to communicative and culturally based approaches. With community at the center, students learn about core values, culture, their homelands, their people’s history, and current tribal affairs as they learn their language. Students become connected to what is essential to their tribal community and to the ways of their ancestors. It also links students with members of their larger, not just tribal, community who contribute to its diverseness, and in so doing it opens students’ awareness to elders, leaders, mentors, and peers they might not have encountered in a more teacher-centered classroom learning experience. ‘Diverseness’ means that students learn about people in their community; they learn about jobs and what people do; they learn about their government and the departments in their government. Students drive learning as much as teachers.

Place-based education supports recommendations of Indigenous educators for Indigenous students. Place-based education meets the call for the integration of the local and the inclusion of cultural knowledge in teaching, as well as increased involvement by the community. Incorporating culture into learning affords the opportunity for students to participate in traditional practices of the community today, linking the past to the present. In addition, culture place-based language learning builds identity and connection to surroundings. By design, it is collaborative and cultivates relationship building. It is experiential and so nurtures learners’ curiosity, builds cooperation among students, and strengthens problem-solving abilities.

A culture place-based learning approach positions curriculum and lessons in local events and places, and acknowledges that learning happens not only in formal educational settings but also outside of school in families and communities. This reinforces connections to one’s home, family, community, and world. Included components can be the cultural, historical, social, religious, and/or economic relevance of specific locations or regions.Footnote ²⁶

Culture place-based learning supports communicative language use as students work together on projects to investigate and understand the world at large. Here, for example, they use learned skills to make observations, collect data, and interview community members to carry out a group learning task. At the end of a project they disseminate the result in presentations at school and to community groups. Cooperation and communication are essential throughout the process, and team members learn to respect each other’s views and contributions.

Since 2000, I have been a member of the curriculum team at the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community (CTGR) in Grand Ronde, Oregon in the United States. We have been writing culture place-based curriculum for their preschool, elementary, and high-school Chinuk Wawa immersion classroom where students three to ten and thirteen to seventeen years of age receive instruction. Our goal has been to create lessons that will promote learning, foster curiosity, and develop the connection to community. And they must be written and taught in ways that inspire learners to want to learn more.

Initially, a curriculum team (teachers, elders, curriculum writers, linguists, science, language arts teachers, community cultural specialists, parents) brainstorms ideas, and develops a topical curriculum web that provides interrelated themes, language needed, the sequence of what will be taught, and accompanying materials and resources (people as well as objects). Throughout, culture place-based objectives are incorporated into academic standards that meet school district requirements.

In developing culture place-based curriculum, we begin with:

1. (1) Curricular topic idea that comes from teachers, students, a member of the community, and parents, for example, ‘basketry’. From a topic,

2. (2) Thematic units are determined and created; one could be material resources for basket-making: cedar basketry, hazel basketry, juncus basketry (plant resources). Or a unit could center on basket types (function) – for root digging, storage, holding water, for cooking. Another unit can center on basketry patterns. After units are determined we develop

3. (3) Lessons and materials

Here are some other topic examples:

• traditional lifeways (basketry, canoe making, digging roots) – each of these can be its own topic as seen above with basketry

• animals (beaver, elk, deer, condor)

• elders past and present

• storytellers

• roots (celery, camas)

• fish (salmon)

• berries (huckleberry, salal)

• acorns

• canoes

• land

• water and forest management

• health

An example of a place-based curriculum is the project Basketry: Place, Community, and Voices, a multidisciplinary, year-long unit. The project emerged from parent‒community Chinuk Wawa language curriculum meetings. For decades, adult basketry-making classes/workshops have occurred year-round in Grand Ronde. Now parents wanted their children to learn about basket-making and initiated that classes be taught in the schools. Specifically parents and teachers wanted students to:

• understand that baskets are an important part of Grand Ronde culture

• know that juncus and hazel are used in creating traditional baskets

• identify different weaving materials in situ and in class

• be able to talk about weaving processes in both Chinuk Wawa and English

• weave different types of baskets with these materials.

Curricula meet Oregon State standards in math, science, social studies, history, art, and literary arts. Some examples of preschool – fifth-grade lessons include:

1. (1) Math – counting weavers; Geometric basket designs; Estimation; Even and odd numbers.

2. (2) Social Studies and History – Use of baskets and basket weavers past and present; Influence of outside communities.

3. (3) Stories and Literature – Hattie Hudson – a story of a past elder basket weaver.

4. (4) We Go Gather – a story about giving back to nature when taking from it.

5. (5) Science – Where, when, and how to harvest; Charring sticks for bark removal; Best management practices for guaranteeing future harvests; Processing materials; Qualities of good basketry materials; Experimenting with materials.

In workshops, specific basketry skills are targeted, so a year’s curriculum can be taught in four or five intensive workshops. In schools, the curriculum is year-long and follows the seasons and time of year when gathering, processing, and weaving are carried out traditionally. For example, hazel is collected in the spring when sap is running throughout the plant. This is climate dependent, so one year it could occur in March, another year could be earlier or later. Learners travel to areas in their community on the Reservation to gather it. They begin weaving in the late spring and summer (also in the fall and winter) after hazel sticks have been prepared. In the summer and early fall, they use hazel baskets to gather berries, and in the early spring in digging roots. Winter lessons include learning basketry stories as traditional stories are told after the first freeze, learning gathering and digging songs and prayers, and learning basketry patterns. Each season learners are taught how to identify hazel in its environment, and how to care for it.

In developing curricular products, we considered those that would benefit the school and the community in general. Thus materials that resulted from the project serve various learner groups. Materials were made by students, parent and family members, basket weavers in the community, teachers, and the curriculum team and include: a multidisciplinary, twenty lesson year-long unit on hazel and juncus basketry of the Grand Ronde people; story, material processing, and pictorial books; and workshop videos.

Summing up, we find that culture place-based curriculum engages youth and children in learning their language in culturally appropriate ways. It builds relationships among mentors and youth, and supports older children to be role models for younger children. We experienced first-hand that a strength of culture place-based curriculum is that it is collaborative and local. It supports the understanding of plant materials, and traditional uses and practices of basketry. This aids in developing better natural resource management practices on tribal, private, and national forest lands. The curriculum informs learners about the health of the environment and land.

We see that learners, young and older, from traditional and nontraditional homes, are more willing to participate in community events at their tribal gym, longhouse/plankhouse (places where ceremony is practiced), and on reservation land (gathering natural resources for weaving, for example) because the curriculum familiarizes learners with traditional and community practices – learning holds at its center the values and traditions (past and present) of its elders, families, learners, and community members. In this way culture place-based learning offers an opportunity for community centered learning that promotes learners’ well-being.

15.6 Sámi School Education and Cultural Environmentally Based Curriculum

In 1997, a separate Sámi School was established in Norway. It follows the principles of the Sámi curriculum in the district area of the Sámi language, emphasizing the importance of bilingualism and the improvement of the status of this Indigenous language after it became officially recognized in the Sámi administrative district in 1990.

Ideally, teaching should be sensitive to the cultural values of the surrounding community. The Sámi curriculum has been developed by working groups including Sámi representatives. This model is based on cultural sensitivity and multilingualism.

Culturally sensitive teaching goals are fulfilled when Sámi education is grounded in Sámi conceptions of place, time, and knowledge (as discussed in Case Study 7 in this chapter). In Sámi culture, the concept of space is circular. Time is sun-centered and bound to observing nature. As a result, teaching takes into account the Sámi understanding of time by organizing classes in a more flexible way and giving up the forty-five-minute scheduling typical for school culture. In addition, the eight Sámi seasons are respected by considering the livelihoods and seasonal work of the Sámi. Traditional local knowledge and linguistic concepts are also included in the learning process.

Learning centered around Sámi values guides students and helps them to understand the social connections of community, their surroundings and nature. Teaching also has to include learning about flora and fauna and should reveal the strong connections between people and nature. Sámi traditional knowledge is derived directly from the environment where people live: concrete working situations and cottages, lean-to shelters, and campfires function as venues for a type of scientific seminar, as discussions are held there and traditional knowledge spreads. Culture-based learning is achieved through storytelling, conversations, and direct participation in these activities, as well as recalled memories and experiences. When applied in the school context, it means that knowledge is a shared experience, which has at its foundation an ecological approach. Thus, education connects to every area of Sámi life, and promotes pupils’ well-being and their links to the environment and land. Building on the school educational context, community members, parents, and elders also help children to recognize and incorporate traditional upbringing practices and working methods (Figure 15.6.1).

Figure 15.6.1 A girl in a gákti (traditional Sámi dress).

Photo by Ibbá Lauhamaa

Parents and pupils need to be at the center of learning. The starting point in developing a curriculum involves organizing practical ‘idea circles’ for parents and pupils to discuss what they expect, what they dream of, and what their values are. To make sure that interaction and cooperation between pupils and parents works well, teachers need to set aside their role as an authority of school knowledge. It is also important to incorporate meaningful rituals into the curriculum. For example, you can reflect on how you start your teaching in the morning, maybe including morning circles and storytelling, and other kinds of culturally meaningful rituals to engage students each day. Employing traditional storytelling will support content learning and increase students’ engagement in the learning process. You can also start your day by singing traditional music and songs, luohti, reading stories from books, and also presenting stories orally. Then the day can continue with tasks that pupils themselves plan, based on the week’s goals. According to the Sámi values, learning should include working outside as well as inside, with physical activities that are connected to the day’s learning goals.

Phenomenon-based curricular units can be organized around stories, for example, a chapter dealing with reindeer herding can include a story on drying meat in a lávvu (see Figure 15.6.2). We can also talk about drying fish or elk meat or smoking fish or meat. Students will learn traditional knowledge and Sámi values both through stories and more academic learning. For example, units can include:

• Stories and language arts – students learn traditional stories and create their own storybooks. Digital education materials can be included.

• Science – simple chemistry that is connected to traditional knowledge

  1. – What happens to meat when it is dried?

  2. – Does it weigh more or less when it dries?

  3. – Does the color change?

  4. – How is it dried?

  5. – How and why is it stored?

  6. – When is it eaten?

• Ecology and natural resources

  1. – Taking care of the environment

  2. – Taking care of reindeer

  3. – Sustainable development

• Art and Music

  1. – Sámi traditional handicrafts

  2. – Traditional music

  3. – Documenting the drying of reindeer meat through pictures, photos, and digitally (blogs, social media)

• Social Studies and History

  1. – History and present-day practices of reindeer herding

• Food and cooking

  1. – Traditional knowledge about drying reindeer meat

  2. – Interviewing traditional knowledge holders

  3. – Cooking traditional food and serving it to the community.

Figure 15.6.2 Reindeer meat will be smoked in a lávvu (lean-to-shelter).

Photo by Pigga Keskitalo

Where an endangered language is no longer being passed on in the family, activities focused on language learning should take the cultural contexts into account. Language learning should take an approach that integrates both content and language. Integrating content into language learning will support children without high levels of proficiency in the target language, providing them with concrete stimuli and practical situations that help them understand both the concepts and language.

15.7 ‘Use It, Don’t Lose It’ ᎲᏗᏍᎨᏍᏗ ᏤᏍᏗ, ᏣᏲᎱᏎᎸᎯ

In 2001–2003, I was an Intern at the Cherokee Immersion program inside a daycare on the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee North Carolina. It was there that I first learned the importance of immersion. I was placed in a classroom with three fluent speakers and seven babies around one to two years of age. My most fond recollection was running out ahead of the class on their group walks to let everyone in our path know that ‘we’ve got immersion babies coming, please speak only Cherokee to them, don’t use English’. To us, English was like a sickness that we didn’t want to expose our babies to. It was our effort to give them an environment of Cherokee Language and Culture only, and it was working.

Somewhere along the way of adding more classrooms, we began to stretch our speakers out too thin in order to accommodate the vast amount of interest the community had for wanting their children to be able to speak Cherokee. As years went on, the Immersion Academy administration, as well as the parents of the students, became concerned for their children’s inability to read English on the child’s grade level. This was the beginning of when English took over.

I can recall a pivotal moment that happened in 2014 as I was the Early Childhood Supervisor. When supervising the three-year-old room, I overheard the children saying things like, ‘Come down here and fight me’, ‘Oh no I fell off the cliff’, and ‘Hurry up or the dinosaur is going to eat you’. Simple sentences but in English. I started writing down what they were saying, and they were things that I didn’t know how to say in Cherokee. After a page and a half, I asked the second language learner teacher, who has been there for ten years if she could translate all these into Cherokee. After she read through it, she handed the paper back to me and said a few. It was then that I realized we needed to teach our teachers. We can’t teach what we don’t know.

I started an adult program like the one our brothers and sisters from Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma had. It was geared toward my early childhood staff, but failed because of the teachers not having enough time to work in their classrooms and spend enough time to learn the language.

In July 2018, I took on our first cohort of adult-language learners. We started out with something I call ‘Interview, Lexicon and Pre-test (ILP)’. The first day we gave the learners an interview or ‘hot-seat’ if you will. The learners would come in one at a time and sit in front of myself and the (7) speakers, where we would ask them random questions such as ‘What is your name’, ‘Where do you live’, ‘Where did you grow up,’ ‘How old are you’, ‘Do you have any kids’, ‘Who are your parents,’ ‘What is your clan’, etc. This was done to give us a baseline of where each learner was at with their language skills. Some learners were able to answer a few of the questions, and some were unable to answer even one. Every four to six months we would reinterview them, and they would show tremendous improvement. By the end of the first year they were all able to answer every single one of those same questions without hesitation.

Once the interviews were complete, I had each learner create a lexicon. They were asked to write down every word and phrase that they knew how to say in the Cherokee language. I believe that we as second language learners know how much we know and that we could effectively display what we know in the lexicon. Just like the interviews, after around four to six months the learners would add new words and phrases that they had learned to their lexicons. The new words and phrases were entered under a separate color so that we could see the growth that they had made.

Finally, a pretest was given. The test content was randomly selected lessons that we would eventually cover in the future. I would also administer the same test after the first year of learning in the program, and again at the end of the second year of the program.

Our classes would focus on our speakers, and our elders, and the great knowledge they have about the way our ancestors might have done things many years ago. For example, this past year we planted a garden. We got to harvest our flour corn, our beans, and our squash that we had grown all while still focusing on and using the language. I believe that hands-on learning is the best way to learn a language. We were able to take our classroom outside of the traditional classroom setting, but still making sure we would be able to stay in the language while taking trips outside. Our trips consisted of learning traditional medicines, wild foods, and stories from long ago. We would practice in the classroom before going out and doing it. We practiced on our pronunciations, the words we could use, and the techniques for proper planting or harvesting.

My experience with teaching adults has been amazing and rewarding. To see people come in and know nothing of the language, go to being able to have basic conversations in the language, and some even going back out into the community to teach some classes has made it all worthwhile. Creating more teachers and creating more speakers is what keeps our fire burning. Each year we will have a new cohort and each year from here on out we will be graduating students who can teach what they’ve learned and most importantly, we’re adding another language speaker into our community. They’re not fluent by any means, but they are not afraid to use what they know and learn as they grow. I am extremely proud of our group and their drive to learn our language. I will leave you with this. Language and culture doesn’t care about color or creed. Language and culture cares about who loves it and will take the time to learn it.

15.8 We Stand Strong in Our Knowledge: Learning Anishinaabemowin One Word Bundle at a Time

During the time when residential schools operated in Canada, the ancestral languages were beaten out of Indigenous children and speakers were shamed for using their mother tongues. Today, many Indigenous people feel embarrassed and dispossessed because they did not learn their language or because they don’t speak it perfectly. In spring 2018, our group of scholars and community practitioners set out to jumpstart Anishinaabemowin language revitalization at the University of Guelph – an institution, which at the time had practically no Indigenous language activity. We called our project ‘We stand strong in our knowledge’ because we wanted to offer the campus community members (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) opportunities to develop personal ‘language bundles’ – a collection of Anishinaabemowin words built around their own knowledge, identities, and stories. We also wanted to create spaces where the language learners could feel a sense of safety and belonging.

Our university is situated on the treaty lands and the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit whose language is Anishinaabemowin. It is also located on a Dish with One Spoon territory that honors the agreement between the Anishinaabe, the Mississaugas, and the Haudenosaunee to share and protect this land. Yet, the buildings on our campus are named after educational philanthropists, university deans, and presidents with no reference to the Indigenous people who have been the stewards of this place for countless generations. And so, we decide to start our revitalization activities with a symbolic act of renaming several university buildings. In a unique walk around campus our group of students, faculty and staff members explored the names of familiar spaces with the help of an Anishinaabe language keeper Rene Meshake. Rene, who likes to call himself a funky Elder, has been working with Anishinaabemowin concepts most of his life, unpacking their meaning morpheme by morpheme through storytelling and art.

We start our walk at the University Centre – the main hub on campus with access to the food court, study spaces, and administration offices. The participants tell stories about vibrant community events, the feeling of excitement, and constant movement they associate with this place. Rene names it Odena (the heart lodge). He compares the youth arriving at the University Centre to new blood coming into the heart.

We then visit the science complex where students have their biology, physics, and chemistry labs. They talk about a sense of accomplishment and the joy that comes from learning about the diversity of life forms. Rene gifts us with another word – Mino bimaadiziwin (good life). He explains that Bimaadiz means ‘full of life, spirit, and soul’ and that’s exactly how we feel standing in the middle of a beautiful atrium filled with warm spring light.

We repeat the same activity in other places on campus and each time a new word bundle emerges, followed by stories and life lessons generously shared by Rene. Kino’amadiwigamig (a place of giving directions) describes the helpers’ room at the library where students support their peers in becoming better writers and communicators. As we enter the next building, often used for exams, the participants share stories of anxiety, but also of relief and newly built courage. Rene reciprocates with stories about times of great struggle in his personal life. We then decide on a name – Godjiewisiwin (a place of trial/testing).

The concept of Nanda wendjige (seeking sustenance from the earth) comes up when we visit a building with small classrooms where students typically use hallways to brainstorm and work on collective projects. This place makes us reflect on the ability to be creative and make use of the limited space and resources one has available. Rene connects this contemporary learning context with traditional land use, trapping, and hunting skills he learned back in his home territory. These activities honored the earth as people took only what was needed for their communities.

In a similar way, we only take away from this activity that which resonates with us. We finish our walk amazed at the abundance of stories captured by the word bundles and we feel enriched by the opportunity to look at our everyday experiences through the lens of Indigenous knowledge. We might not be speakers of Anishinaabemowin (yet), but we can weave the new words into the fabrics of our lives with gratitude for the meaningful relationships we created with each other and with the place where we work and learn.

16.1 Art, Music and Cultural Activities in the Revitalisation of Wymysiöeryś

The revitalisation of Wymysiöeryś wouldn’t be so advanced today if we hadn’t taken up the task of revitalising not only the culture, but also the inhabitants of Wilamowice. We started this when we were only teenagers, together with Tymoteusz Król. Back in the 1990s, a person who encountered our town would only be presented with colourful costumes and old cottages – just the view that journalists would use when they wanted to show the last speakers of Wymysiöeryś. The regional ensembles of dance and singing presented only the costume and folklore.

I began my personal engagement with language revitalisation as an adventure with the regional ensemble as a young child. Back then I had no clue how complicated the problem of revitalising Wymysiöeryś culture was. Having joined the children’s ensemble ‘Cepelia-Fil’ I still didn’t feel engaged in Wilamowice itself. Nobody could explain to me the phonetically transcribed lyrics of songs (luckily, even back then I spoke with Tymoteusz and my great-grandmother in Wymysiöeryś). Nobody made that sure the costumes people wore reflected faithfully a specific local dress code – even though it is an important marker of identity.

Luckily, in 2007, Tymoteusz and I both joined the Song and Dance Ensemble ‘Wilamowice’. It might seem that the actions of such ensembles are folkloric in nature and destined only for the stage, i.e. that they form a mixture of ‘the nicest looking’, most pleasing elements of culture for the audience, yet are completely deprived of deeper reflection. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The ensemble was founded in 1948, only three years after the Wymysiöeryś language and culture had been banned by local officials collaborating with the communist authorities. For many years it functioned as a ‘time capsule’ as members collected costumes, their names and meanings, old songs and poems, and – above all – embraced the eldest inhabitants of the town who passed on their knowledge to the younger members and also their language, when they had the courage to do so. Thanks to the ensemble we could reach a greater number of inhabitants.

Through the ensemble we got engaged with the activities of the Association ‘Wilamowianie’, a NGO that has enabled us to start a more conscious revitalisation program. In the framework provided by the Association we have organised many cultural events which were strongly oriented towards promoting Wymysiöeryś in the community and changing linguistic attitudes, which still view Wymysiöeryś as ‘something negative’ (see Chapter 7). We tried to keep every meeting relaxed – some topics weren’t at all connected with revitalisation. However, we have always tried to ‘smuggle in’ Wymysiöeryś themes – like during a family fair which included a movie created by our youths about the ‘Pierzowiec’ (feather plucking) tradition. We attempted to make our activities more attractive by including excursions, meetings and workshops that could reach the biggest possible number of inhabitants.

Thanks to our collaboration with the Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales’ of the University of Warsaw, we organised several international events which made the community members aware of the huge external interest in the revitalisation efforts taking place in Wilamowice. Showing the inhabitants how much their cultural heritage is appreciated in academia made it more important to them too. We have also understood the need to ‘de-folklorise’ our activities, while keeping respect for traditions. Thus, Wymysiöeryś also became a medium for modern culture. In 2014, a theatre group was formed, called ‘Ufa fisa’, literally ‘On the feet’ (referring to a metaphor of making Wymysiöeryś culture able to stand again on its own feet). The actions of this group allowed more people to engage in cultural revitalisation and to learn the language, including those people who simply wouldn’t like to or couldn’t attend regular classes. Moreover, the exclusive use of Wymysiöeryś on stage fosters the creation of new intergenerational bonds: to understand the plot, spectators have to ask the eldest speakers and the teenagers who have learned the language and this makes them feel empowered. Staging our performances both in the town and neighbouring villages as well as in the Polish Theatre in Warsaw (see Figures 16.1.1 and 16.1.2) is an additional way of raising the prestige of the language and the awareness of its value as an important asset, both locally and more widely.

Figure 16.1.1 Performance in Wymysiöeryś, Uf jer wełt, Polish Theatre in Warsaw.

© Engaged Humanities Project, University of Warsaw

Figure 16.1.2 Performance in Wymysiöeryś, Ymertihła, Polish Theatre in Warsaw.

Photo by Krzysztof Kędracki, Polish Theatre in Warsaw

The next step was the creation of a band comprised of the members of the Majerski (fum Biöetuł) family (see Figure 16.1.3). They perform covers of modern songs translated by us and our students, thus proving to the skeptics that Wymysiöeryś is not only suited to old local songs. The new songs are real earworms – even those who don’t learn Wymysiöeryś sing them. We also make sure that Wymysiöeryś is always present in the local landscape – not only on various information boards but also during events that are not directly related to revitalisation itself, such as during street fairs and festivals where we promote Wymysiöeryś using merchandise such as t-shirts, bags, badges, mugs and banners.

Figure 16.1.3 Concert in Wymysiöeryś, the Majerski family.

Photo by Marcin Musiał

Luckily, the last few years have proved that the effort put into the revitalisation of language, culture and community members has been fruitful. Language attitudes have changed. Many activities initiated by us now have a life of their own – the inhabitants introduce Wymysiöeryś into their environment and the youth organise their own initiatives, like the first Wymysiöeryś Day or location-based games in Wymysiöeryś. This makes us enormously happy.

16.2 Fest-noz and Revitalisation of the Breton Language

The Breton language, one of languages of Brittany, France, is an endangered language with about 200,000 speakers, mainly from the oldest generation. There are also a few dozens of thousands of new speakers. One of the most significant Breton cultural activities is a fest-noz (plural festoù-noz), the ‘night festival’ during which people get together, dance (not only) traditional Breton dances, enjoy themselves, and create a unique community connected by participation in Breton culture and – in some cases – by the use of Breton language. Nowadays these events are held throughout Brittany at all times of the year, in every possible location, with participants of all generations. They reaffirm that Breton culture is still alive. The music at a fest-noz is usually performed live, in most cases in Breton, although the range of possible accompaniments is broad. The most typical is the kan an discan (‘call and response’) song style, which involves singing without instrumental accompaniment by two or three individuals, whose voices overlap distinctively. The bagpipe-bombard, a traditional woodwind instrument pairing, also appears, playing a similar type of music. Yet very often there are whole bands on stage with ‘modern’ instruments.

The type of music, the place of performance and the participants differ according to when and by whom the fest-noz is organised. The functions of fest-noz have changed, just like the function of the Breton language. When daily life in the Breton language was concentrated in the rural areas in Lower and Central Brittany, traditional dances and festivities were related to the agricultural year: fest-noz developed from celebrations after collective community work was completed. These customs could not have survived the changes that took place in Brittany during the 1920s and 1930s: the appearance of new technologies moved the Bretons towards French culture and France’s conscious centralist policies targeted minority cultures and languages. These policies ridiculed and humiliated Bretons and their language. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Bretons abandoned their language and traditional dances.

The revival of the Breton language and fest-noz started in the 1970s. Speaking and singing in Breton came to be regarded as a moral duty of young people whose parents had rejected it. The struggle for a Breton way of life became part of the social movement of the 1970s. It was when young people began contesting official culture and expressing their revolt in a festive, musical way. The concept of fest-noz as a rural festival became widely accepted and it perfectly matched the social attitudes of young Breton activists who were searching for their roots. As a result, fest-noz provided a link between the worlds of the ‘young’ and the ‘old’, between ‘modernity’ and ‘authenticity’. Fest-noz events were no longer seen as pure entertainment or even a manifestation of pro-Breton attitudes; they became a way of life. The 1970s were successful in bringing forward the question of the Breton language as an important element of Breton culture, as well as re-evaluating Breton identity. Breton music, literature, theatre, and audiovisual arts bloomed. In 1977, the first Diwan community-run immersion school was formed. Since Diwan schools received no subsidies, money required to run them was collected during fest-noz organised by school collectives, activists and friends. After that period fest-noz lost some impetus. The late 1990s saw the arrival of a new style of fest-noz, closely linked to the Bretons’ fast-changing lifestyles and matching the progressing urbanisation as well as the advent of new, digital media. There are now Cyber Fest Noz events with several dozens of dancers live-streamed and transmitted through the Internet and accessible all around the world. The format is appealing to young people and makes participation in a minority culture attractive. Over time, fest-noz became an integral part of Breton culture. It did change style and function, but it has always been connected with Breton identity. It has also been a tool for Breton language revitalisation as many young people open themselves to the Breton language thanks to participation in these events. With its festival character, it is easily accessible to people; it allows those who want to use Breton to meet and develop closer relationships; it is also a place where most Breton activist movements and ideas come into life.

16.3 Modern Music Genres for Language Revitalisation

The arts, and musical production in particular, are becoming ever more central domains in grassroots efforts for language revitalisation in Latin America. Modern music genres such as rock, reggae, rap among others have been appropriated by Indigenous youths all over the continent. In Mexico, for instance, a growing number of bands are using Indigenous languages as a vehicle for artistic expression: Sak Tzevul (rock in Tzotzil), La Sexta Vocal (ska in Zoque) or El Rapero de Tlapa (rap in Mixtec) are examples of cultural activism among youths who look to expand their languages into new domains of use. Rappers from other Latin American countries, such as B’alam Ajpu in Guatemala, Luanko and the band Wechekeke ñi trawun in Chile, or Liberato Kani in Peru (to name but a few), are some outstanding examples of artists who have an already extensive career singing in Indigenous languages (Tzutujil, Mapudungun and Quechua, respectively). In the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, hip hop as a cultural movement has become particularly prominent, and a sizeable number of Mayan rappers use now Yucatec Maya in their performances. If we consider the number of online views of songs such as Ki’imak in wóol by Tihorappers Crew (over 450,000 views in two years on YouTube) and the overwhelmingly positive comments to performances in Indigenous languages, the impact that these songs can have in changing negative attitudes towards Indigenous languages is noteworthy.

Some central aspects of rap make it a particularly productive genre for language revitalisation purposes. On the one hand, the central place that verbal fluency and creativity play in rapping aligns with Indigenous cultures that often favour oral ways of cultural expression, and, on the other, the local adaptation and recreation of hip hop as a global popular movement associated with modernity and ‘coolness’. As is well known, one of the ideological pillars of contempt for Indigenous languages is the alleged inability of these languages to express modernity and their unjustified association with cultural backwardness. Lastly, hip hop performances may incorporate a political element and provide a platform for the expression of marginalised voices. Some highly politicised Mapuche rappers, for instance, use hip hop as a platform for broader social struggles that include demands for language rights and political recognition.

Several video clips of Indigenous rappers are available on YouTube; try searching for the groups mentioned. Their music can also be found on other online platforms such as Soundcloud, Hulkshare and even Spotify.

16.4 The Jersey Song Project

Most people understand that songs can be a great way to help learn a language and perhaps remember some important phrases or patterns, but in fact the value of music for language revitalisation goes much deeper than that. Music is of course one of the most powerful ways to keep a language alive in our hearts and imaginations, and music can be profoundly connected to identity. Through music we can create inspiring and memorable collective experiences that can really help boost the status and public image of a language. When used in a culturally sensitive way, music can be a very versatile and useful tool in the linguistic toolbox.

One successful example of this from my own experience is The Jersey Song Project (which I have to say is an idea I stole from some friends in Guernsey!). The small British island of Jersey, in the Channel Islands, is home to the endangered language Jèrriais (a local version of Norman). As a local musician and activist I’ve been finding out how music can help in the revitalisation process. The central concept of The Jersey Song Project was to facilitate and curate collaborative songwriting between local musicians (who didn’t speak much Jèrriais, if any) and Jèrriais speakers, towards a final performance of songs that could be on any theme and in any genre, but would include at least one word of Jèrriais in the lyrics. Over the course of a few months in 2018, I advertised the project and organised for twelve local bands and solo artists to work with Jèrriais speakers and come up with something for the final gig. This took place at a professional performance venue as part of a local festival in the autumn.

The project was a real success, not just in terms of the final gig going well, but for the deeper connections that the musicians and audience made with the language, and also for the excellent publicity the whole project generated over those few months. I’d highly recommend running a similar project wherever there is enough of a local music scene for it to be appropriate (like I said – I stole the idea, so please do steal it from me).

Just a few practical pointers … I’d say there are three main ways of getting the collaborations going:

1. (1) The ideal way: musicians could meet up with native speakers and write something entirely new together (you’d need to organise this carefully to make it go as well as possible).

2. (2) Musicians could set an existing endangered language text (e.g. a poem) to music, with the support of native speakers or teachers.

3. (3) Musicians could work with native speakers/teachers to translate some of their own lyrics of a non-endangered language song they’ve already written.

Cover versions are OK, and the right song could be very popular, but you might run into copyright issues; and anyway, participants will probably engage more deeply if they use their own songs. Also, I’d say allow plenty of time for the process to unfold and try to make as much of a public ‘splash’ as you can with whatever you might do for the final performance, or recording, or both! Finally if you do run your own version of this, please get in touch as I’d love to hear all about it … Bouonne chance m’s anmîns! [Good luck my friends!]

16.5 One Song, Many Voices: Revitalising Ainu through Music

The Ainu are an Indigenous group native to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the island of Sakhalin and the Kurils. Their language is critically endangered, although there are ongoing efforts to improve its profile, and increase the take-up of the language. Those of Ainu descent are also electing to become more visible, both within Japan, and as part of the global Indigenous community. One of the ways that some Ainu are demonstrating and transmitting their cultural and linguistic identity is through music.

Traditional Ainu music relies on singing, rekuhara (throat singing), mukkuri (mouth harp), and in the Sakhalin tradition, the tonkori (a plucked string instrument). Upopo (domestic work songs) tend to be simple in structure, with many songs sung in rounds. Yukar (sung epics) are formed of a short repetitive melody, and a sakehe (refrain) unique to each yukar. Contemporary Ainu music draws on many of these elements, but there is still diversity in how the music is expressed, although the use of the Ainu language, in titles or lyrics, remains the defining element.

Artists such as Oki Kano and ToyToy demonstrate the breadth of contemporary approaches to Ainu Music, but it is perhaps the group Marewrew who are most prominently weaving discussions about the language, and audience interaction with the language into their performances.

Marewrew is a group comprised of four female singers of Ainu heritage, who originally formed in 2002 to work with Oki Kano, the most well-known Ainu musician in Japan, and who later began performing as an independent ensemble. They perform upopo, some of which they have learned directly from family members, either acapella (unaccompanied singing) or accompanied by clapping or the mukkuri. All their material is performed in the Ainu language, and during performances they wear traditional clothing, and sometimes recreate the facial tattooing that Ainu women wore traditionally. Their music is based on simple foundations, repeated rhythmic and vocal patterns, and the use of nonsense syllables; but it is hypnotic and compelling. As a listener, understanding of the language is an additional benefit but not a crucial requirement for enjoyment. However, Marewrew enjoy enabling their listeners to interact more with the music, and actively encourage participation and understanding of the songs’ contexts.

Marewrew not only explain the meanings of songs, they also teach a number of songs during their sets, creating a shared space where the audience become active participants in a performance that uses the Ainu language. These ‘educational segments’ are almost delivered as mini-workshops, inviting further questions and queries from their audience. At a 2018 concert in east Tokyo that I attended (see Figure 16.5.1), this collaborative approach went even further, with a number of audience members not only knowing some of the songs performed, but offering translations of Ainu terms if one of the singers was unsure of the most accurate Japanese term. From singer to audience and back again, a teaching and expansion of vocabulary and context: everyone present engaged in learning and disseminating Ainu. Leaving a concert, or coming to the end of recording, may of course be the end of the process: we generally listen to enjoy music, not to learn. However, the potential is there for a listener to seek out more recordings, to want to understand, to actively experience more, and part of that experience can be learning more of the language. Hearing Ainu music for the first time as an undergraduate in the early 2000s certainly set me on that path, that just over fifteen years later, sees me researching the impact of Ainu language music on the language and actively learning Ainu myself.

Figure 16.5.1 Concert poster

Thus, a single song, Umeko Ando singing Saranpe as it happens, was enough to make me want to move from being a passive admirer of Ainu music and the Ainu language, to becoming an active participant: to learn and disseminate, not merely appreciate.

16.6 The Language Revitalization, Maintenance and Development Project

The Language Revitalization, Maintenance and Development Project (PRMDLC) in Mexico has been active for over three decades. Based on the idea of direct collaboration between speakers and researchers, the PRMDLC runs collaborative workshops to encourage a high level of participation. The PRMDLC starts from the recovery of peoples’ own language and culture, producing oral and image-based culturally appropriate materials, recreating them in prestigious media such as a TV screen, where Indigenous children rarely see their languages. Therefore the basic goal of the PRMDLC is to establish a (re)vitalising corpus; among others, a collection of printed, audio-visual and multimedia materials in Indigenous languages, produced and consumed by speakers themselves, while at the same time aiming to impact a broader audience (see Figures 16.6.1 and 16.6.2).

Figure 16.6.1 Los sueños del tlacuache.

© PRMDLC Project

Figure 16.6.2 ‘Carrusel’. Los sueños del tlacuache.

© PRMDLC Project

The PRMDLC holds revitalisation workshops aimed at encouraging and/or reinforcing permanent revitalisation through self-developed activities such as language games and music, from the bottom-up. Speakers are credited as the first and principal (multi)authors of multimedia products, including local tales as The Mermaid and the Opossum, riddles and tongue twisters, books, documentary films, games, and different musical genres (for example rap, rock, jarocho music). Participation of speakers is highly valued and incentivised, dignifying their languages and cultures. For instance, we have worked, among others, with a native artist and two Maya-speaking linguists and one anthropologist, leaders of the Maya team. They have seen their work published and available at major bookstores around the country and beyond, as well as included in multimedia products (Maya riddles, tongue twisters, tales) circulating on the Internet and even on public television. They are committed to disseminate the products within their own communities – their primary audience.

The PRMDLC workshops are organised as follows. Participants are summoned in events such as local patron saint festivities. These festivals are favourable occasions for bringing together many people, including migrants who have moved to big cities or even the USA, and visitors from several other local towns. Children attend workshops with their siblings, parents or grandparents, promoting links between generations. Children are invited to watch an animated movie: after showing the riddle(s) or the Mermaid/Opossum movie(s), the floor is thrown open to participation. Local champions leading the workshops invite the audience to repeat a tongue twister, or ask if someone knows another similar version of the stories, opening up the possibility of children’s spontaneous participation and even other emergent dynamics. Participants can express themselves freely. In principle there is no time limit (most sessions last from two to five hours). This allows for a relaxed atmosphere, unlike typical school dynamics. For example, animated riddles are shown, a genre that engages audience participation. This motivates strong participation by children, who suggest diverse, not conceived as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ answers to the riddles (for instance the reply to the Nahuatl riddle Maaske mas tikwaalantok pero tikpiipiitsos (‘No matter how angry you are, you are going to kiss it anyhow’) can vary, ranging from a bottle to an aatekoomatl, ‘drinking water gourd’, or even other possible emergent answers. Riddles, tales, and tongue twisters are bastions of linguistic and cultural retention. Riddles, for example, are a powerful genre that calls on interaction and verbal play, not to mention tongue twisters that are culturally powerful language games stimulating interaction and cultural continuity.

In this way the PRMDLC develops a method of indirect revitalisation. This means that participation is open to spontaneous, not forced participation, in ‘natural’, cultural sensitive ways. It stimulates intergenerational transmission of the endangered language. In this sense, it is up to children whether or not to participate. It is very different from formalised ways of participation typical of school contexts that work as inhibitors of Indigenous knowledge and tongues, and therefore favour assimilation.

17.1 How about Just Shifting Back? How One Passamaquoddy Speaker Led Her Community to Language Documentation and Revitalization

Margaret Apt, a middle-aged Passamaquoddy woman from Eastern Maine, USA, had grown up away from the Reservation and was doing everything she could to improve her Passamaquoddy language skills, but now the Elders were no longer speaking in public. She noticed that when they needed a new word to discuss a contemporary topic they would shift to, and then remain speaking in, English. Passamaquoddy, an Algonquian language of the Eastern USA and Canada, was becoming invisible. I asked Margaret if we could try an experiment using video. She agreed and began to convene a group of speakers who also agreed to be filmed. Whenever the talk drifted into English, Margaret would gently remind the speaker to switch back to Passamaquoddy. It worked, and soon speakers were having long conversations about contemporary experiences totally in Passamaquoddy. This speaker-facilitated, nonintrusive, documentary style videotaping soon became an accepted method for Passamaquoddy language documentation. Subsequent presentation of the video back to the participants and community, referred to as Video Feedback, stimulated more deeply contextualized conversation and sometimes motivated new language initiatives (see Figure 17.1.1). Margaret became the first Facilitator of the method that came to be called Natural Group Conversation and Activity Documentation. So just by acting on her wish to speak Passamaquoddy with her friends without English intruding, and with a little help from the video, Margaret launched an active process of language revitalization in her community that is also being replicated elsewhere.

Figure 17.1.1 Ben Levine and Julia Schulz documenting Passamaquoddy-Maliseet natural conversation as developed with Margaret (Dolly) Apt.

Photo by Ian Larson

As Facilitator, Margaret would create a safe space for speaking. She might start the conversation off with a question and then ask for contextualizing information. Speakers gained confidence and soon were telling stories, laughing, or commiserating – creating speaker-driven language in natural, real-life ways. Playing the video back gave the speakers new awareness and the emotional strength to take on the topics that concerned them and activities they wanted filmed. More speakers became involved, and a new confidence to address language endangerment emerged as Passamaquoddy became more visible again.

This practice of video feedback triggers new and often deeper conversations, creating rich content for teaching and learning as well as linguistic analysis. Recording these conversations and playing them back has proven to be helpful in addressing historic community trauma and its effects in suppressing language use. It has also resulted in the emergence of new leaders advocating for revitalization.

Margaret and other participants next learned to log, transcribe, translate, and subtitle over 100 videos, first available as DVDs that later became part of the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet online dictionary and audio archive which can be seen at www.PMPortal.org. Margaret taught her daughter Plansowes and some friends who had tried to learn Passamaquoddy and understood the language but couldn’t speak it, how to record dictionary entries and example sentences with Elders and then post them on the Portal. The recording process immediately helped these tech-savvy, 30-something fluent comprehenders improve their language skills and increased their interest in learning and using the language. Excited at this breakthrough, they shared Portal links to words and videos on social media. Soon there was heightened visibility of the language, increased respect for speakers, and an expanding new constituency for Passamaquoddy language, especially among those living in the diaspora who could now be connected to the language. The Elders, in turn, became acquainted, in a non-threatening way, with the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet writing system.

The participants in Margaret’s conversations subsequently initiated new language revival projects: two immersion preschools; a video-based program for fluent comprehenders and language classes for adults. One man engaged in graduate studies so that he could become a linguist for the tribe. Two others became language teachers. What started with one person, Margaret, looking for ways to get her own Passamaquoddy language back, grew into language revitalization with many different components. Today there are new speakers of Passamaquoddy for the first time in forty years, and the model has inspired other groups. Language activists in an Ayöök-speaking Mixe community in Southern Mexico saw Passamaquoddy videos and invited Speaking Place to start the documentation and revitalization process in their town. The Mixe have used the same methods. They have also had training from our team on linguist-guided community self-documentation. Like the Passamaquoddy who inspired them, they have started immersion schools and are building a Mixe radio station. Now other towns in Oaxaca are starting to adopt these methods as well. While each community shapes the methods and process to their own circumstances, starting with video documentation of facilitated natural group conversation and activity can be a potent launching pad for revitalization.

17.2 Online Language Learning Materials Development

Welsh is relatively fortunate among the world’s lesser-used languages, with its official status, government support, rich literary tradition, dedicated radio and television channels, and important role in the education system in Wales. Welsh-medium education is available from nursery right through to university-level, whilst those attending English-medium schools learn Welsh as a second language. It is also possible to learn Welsh as an adult, and around 18,000 learners attend adult Welsh classes in Wales each year.

One course provider, Nant Gwrtheyrn, specializes in week-long residential courses, which particularly attract learners from abroad or whose lifestyles don’t suit weekly classes. However these learners sometimes find it tricky to maintain the ‘buzz’ and keep using their Welsh once they’ve returned home. Through the KESSFootnote ² programme, a partnership was established between Nant Gwrtheyrn and myself, a PhD student at Cardiff University, in order to develop a research-based set of online learning materials that would complement the beginners’ level residential course and allow learners to maintain regular contact with the Welsh language.

Despite the very specific context of the project, the lessons I learned should be applicable to online materials development in many environments.

• Try to plan a manageable project based on available human/financial resources. Do you need to create an entire curriculum or just supplementary materials?

• Don’t expect the planning and writing process to follow linear stages – decisions made part-way through the process, or new information about learners’ needs/expectations, will mean you need to revise earlier work.

• If online learning resources are already available for your target language, try to collaborate with the authors rather than competing with them. Don’t reinvent something that has already been produced for your language – focus on creating new resources which will complement existing ones.

• In terms of the language content of materials, consider the domains in which you hope learners will use their language skills. For example, you could select vocabulary and phrases used in the home, in the workplace, in ceremonies, or in the wider community.

• Also keep in mind why you are creating digital learning materials as opposed to paper materials. To reach a geographically dispersed audience? To encourage learners to practise frequently? To facilitate independent learning? Electronic learning materials should not simply be digitised versions of paper materials (e.g. PDFs of worksheets). Instead they should offer something over and above the ‘offline’ experience, making use of what technology can uniquely offer – e.g. interactivity even without classmates/tutors, or instant personalised feedback, or helping make input comprehensible by offering hyperlinks and images.

• Don’t allow technological developments to dictate the resources you create without reference to language learning theories/principles. In other words, don’t create something just because it’s technically possible – always reflect on the benefits a resource will bring to the learning experience.

• For audio/video resources, consider including recordings of ‘new speakers’ as well as ‘native speakers’. In some language contexts this would be an appropriate way of demonstrating that learners are valued members of the linguistic community.

• Plan for future sustainability! I failed at this one, as the online platform hosting my resources has disappeared, taking my content with it! So think about long-term plans for your materials – e.g. how they might be migrated to new platforms, or how they might be adapted for mobile devices as opposed to computers.

17.3 Rising Voices

The Internet provides a special opportunity for communities that speak Indigenous, endangered, and minority languages to attract and involve younger generations in language preservation and revitalization – an involvement that is crucial for the survival of these languages and cultures.

Supporting such communities, especially Indigenous communities across Latin America, in this work has been a primary focus of Rising Voices (RV), the digital inclusion initiative of the organization Global Voices. RV works to promote equity and diversity online through training, mentoring, and the creation of peer-learning networks. With the increased accessibility of devices such as smartphones and tablets, and the spread of Internet connectivity (including through community-owned networks) Indigenous communities are increasingly accessing information online. However, they rarely do so in their native language. That is changing. Communities’ access to information and digital tools is making it easier to create multilingual content themselves. Creating content online by uploading videos to YouTube, translating free software, or writing on blogs and social media platforms is a positive step that Indigenous communities can take toward ensuring that their language is present in all facets of life, especially in the digital realm.

Rising Voices’ support takes many different forms, including organizing workshops and gatherings. In recent times, we have held events in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Chile, in collaboration with a range of local partners. In these meetings, participants run hands-on workshops and engage in peer-led discussions addressing the linguistic, technical, and socio-cultural obstacles they face promoting their languages online. These events also include a public component designed to showcase the work and its possibilities. A direct result of these gatherings has been the creation of local, national, and international networks of mutual support and solidarity.

Rising Voices has also created the Activismo Lenguas (Language Activism) portal to map projects across the region and to highlight the important role that technology is playing in language revitalization, as well as to inspire other communities wanting to do similar types of initiatives. Visitors to the portal can search by country, language, and the type of digital tool that they utilize in their revitalization activities. We are also working to research and analyze the opportunities and challenges for sharing knowledge through Wikipedia in Indigenous languages. This work has given us valuable access to the perspectives of practitioners on the ground, and allowed them to share their stories.

Finally, our social media campaigns encourage engagement with minority languages in a fun way, such as tweeting and creating memes. In observance of the International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019, Rising Voices created a rotating Twitter account (@ActLenguas) where each week a different Indigenous language digital activist manages the account, tweeting about their personal experiences of using technology in support of language revitalization. Our work in Rising Voices has shown the possibilities provided by technology. But it is important to stress that the Internet and digital media are only tools, and that the real driving force behind this work is the hundreds of young people who have stepped forward and demonstrated their commitment to ensuring that their language and culture are reflected in all facets of society, including the Internet.