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The Condition of Native American Languages in the United States
- Ofelia Zepeda, Jane H. Hill
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At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the lands that are now the United States (the forty-eight contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii), there must have been many hundreds of distinct languages. Fewer than two hundred remain, and the future of these is decidedly insecure, even where the remoteness of the location (in the case of Inuit in Northern Alaska) or the large size of the speech community (in the case of Navajo in the Southwest) might seem to protect the community from language loss. Yet even this vastly reduced reservoir of linguistic diversity constitutes one of the great treasures of humanity, an enormous storehouse of expressive power and profound understandings of the universe. The loss of the hundreds of languages that have already passed into history is an intellectual catastrophe in every way comparable in magnitude to the ecological catastrophe we face today as the earth's tropical forests are swept by fire. Each language still spoken is fundamental to the personal, social and - a key term in the discourse of indigenous peoples - spiritual identity of its speakers. They know that without these languages they would be less than they are, and they are engaged in the most urgent struggles to protect their linguistic heritage. The goal of this paper is to review the contexts and practices of this struggle, in the hope that people everywhere will support it.
9 - Native American languages
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- By Akira Y. Yamamoto, University of Kansas, Ofelia Zepeda, University of Arizona
- Edited by Edward Finegan, University of Southern California, John R. Rickford, Stanford University, California
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- Book:
- Language in the USA
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 24 June 2004, pp 153-181
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Summary
Editors' introduction
Some chapters of this book discuss one or several languages imported into the USA and one chapter describes a set of creoles originating in the new world. This chapter focuses on languages that Native Americans were speaking when Europeans first arrived on these shores. Some Native American languages are still spoken, though they are now in imminent danger of dying out. As Akira Y. Yamamoto and Ofelia Zepeda explain, many Native American languages are known today only by aging speakers, but children are no longer acquiring them. Some Native American languages are no longer spoken by anyone. With the Native American Languages Act of 1990 and of 1992, federal laws enabled organizations to be established to train native language teachers, carry out research on these languages, and develop teaching materials and other critical resources for documenting and revitalizing these endangered tongues.
In terms that can be understood with a little effort and are well worth the time, this chapter illustrates ways in which Native American languages differ so dramatically in structure from more familiar European languages. For example, basic word order in English is SVO; that's shorthand for Subject before Verb and Verb before Object, as in The governor (S) vetoed (V) the bill (O). Besides SVO, Native American languages also display other orders, including SOV, VOS, VSO, and OVS. They are able to utilize these word orders partly because certain information that is carried in English utterances by word order (e.g., which noun is the subject and which noun is the object) is carried in Native American languages by affixes on the words themselves.