{"id":4028,"date":"2015-07-27T19:35:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T19:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=4028"},"modified":"2016-08-18T16:40:25","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T16:40:25","slug":"renaissance-on-the-bayou-the-revival-of-a-lost-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/renaissance-on-the-bayou-the-revival-of-a-lost-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Renaissance on the bayou: the revival of a lost language"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel W Hieber<\/a>, University of California, Santa Barbara<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, a 21-year-old linguist named Morris Swadesh<\/a> set out for Louisiana to record the area\u2019s Native American languages, which were disappearing rapidly.<\/p>\n

Morris and his peers were in a race against time to document them, and in the small town of Charenton on the Bayou Teche, he encountered Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux, members of a small tribe called Chitimacha \u2013 and the last two speakers of their language.<\/p>\n

But today, if you visited the Chitimacha reservation<\/a>, you\u2019d never know that their language went unspoken for half a century.<\/p>\n

Over the past several decades, many Native American tribes<\/a> have participated in what has become a robust language revitalization movement<\/a>. As their populations of fluent speakers dwindle and age, tribes want to ensure that their heritage languages are passed on to the next generation \u2013 before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

But because the Chitimacha tribe had no living speakers for a number of decades, it made the challenge that much greater. In the end, the story of the language\u2019s decline, loss and rebirth is a remarkable example of cultural survival.<\/p>\n

Why document a language?<\/h2>\n

Unlike some other cultural legacies, languages leave no trace in the archaeological record. There\u2019s often no trace in the written record, either.<\/p>\n

Only a small portion<\/a> of the world\u2019s estimated 7,000 languages<\/a> are well-documented in places like dictionaries and grammar books. Those that are least well-documented are the most endangered.<\/p>\n

Many dead or dying languages contain exotic features of verbal and written communication. Chitimacha, for example, doesn\u2019t use a word \u201cbe\u201d in phrases like \u201cshe is reading.\u201d Instead, speakers must use a verb of position, such as \u201cshe sits reading\u201d or \u201cshe stands reading.\u201d These are things that challenge linguists’ understanding<\/a> of how language works.<\/p>\n

By working with Ben and Delphine, Morris was trying to capture a small piece of that linguistic diversity before it vanished.<\/p>\n

Wax cylinder recording of Ben Paul, c 1930.<\/div>\n

One day, with Morris sitting on Ben\u2019s porch dutifully scribbling down his every word in a composition notebook, Ben finished a story (a riveting tale of how the Chitimacha first acquired fire by stealing it from a mythical old blind man in the west). He then went on to tell Morris:<\/p>\n

There were very many stories about the west. I believe I am doing well. I have not forgotten everything yet. When I die, you will not hear that sort of thing again. I am the only one here who knows the stories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ben passed away three years later, and Delphine not long thereafter. After their deaths, it seemed the Chitimacha language was doomed to silence.<\/p>\n

Why do languages die?<\/h2>\n

How does a language come to have only two speakers? Why have so many Native American languages become endangered? The causes are manifold, but there are two main ones: sharp reductions in the population of the community that speaks the language, and interruptions in the traditional means of transferring the language from one generation to the next.<\/p>\n

In the past, the former caused the most damage. Native American peoples were decimated by European diseases and subject to outright warfare.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A portrait of two Chitimacha by French-born painter Fran\u00e7ois Bernard (1870).<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prior to European contact, the Chitimacha were lords of the bayou, with a territory stretching from Vermillion Bay in the west to present-day New Orleans in the east. They were expert canoe-makers and wielded extensive knowledge of the region\u2019s labyrinthian network of waterways.<\/p>\n

But by the time the French arrived in present-day Louisiana in 1699, the tribe\u2019s numbers had dwindled to around 4,000<\/a>, their communities gutted by European diseases that spread faster than the Europeans themselves.<\/p>\n

After a protracted war with the French, they retreated deep into the bayou, where the their reservation at Charenton sits today. The 1910 census recorded just 69 people<\/a> living there.<\/p>\n

Only later did the second cause of language decline occur, when children on the reservation were sent to the infamous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which interrupted the transmission of the language to the next generation.<\/p>\n

Ben and Delphine, born in the latter half of the 1800s, were part of the last generation to learn the language at home. Eventually their parents and many of their peers passed away, leaving them as the last two speakers of the language.<\/p>\n

Renaissance on the bayou<\/h2>\n

Ben probably never imagined that the efforts of him and Delphine would spark the tribe\u2019s linguistic renaissance, awakening their language from 60 years of silence.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Delphine Ducloux was one of the two last speakers of the Chitimacha language, prior to its revival.<\/span>
\nState Library of Louisiana<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the early 1990s, cultural director for the tribe Kim Walden received a call from the American Philosophical Society Library<\/a> informing her that they had all of Morris\u2019 notebooks, and even his drafts for a grammar manual and dictionary<\/a>, which totaled hundreds of pages in all. Thus began the herculean effort to revive the language.<\/p>\n

The tribe put together a small-but-dedicated team of language experts, who set out to learn their language as quickly as possible. They began to produce storybooks based on Ben and Delphine\u2019s stories, and word lists from the dictionary manuscript.<\/p>\n

In 2008, the tribe partnered with the software company Rosetta Stone on a two-year project to create computer software for learning the language, which today every registered tribal member has a copy of. This is where I came in, serving as editor and linguist consultant for the project, a monumental collaborative effort involving thousands of hours of translating, editing, recording and photographing. We\u2019re now hard at work finishing a complete dictionary and learner\u2019s reference grammar for the language.<\/p>\n

The Chitimacha language: related to no other language in the world.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, if you stroll through the reservation\u2019s school, you\u2019ll hear kids speaking Chitimacha in language classes, or using it with their friends in the hall. At home they practice with the Chitimacha version of Rosetta Stone, and this past year the tribe even launched a preschool immersion program.<\/p>\n

The kids even make up slang that baffles adult ears, a sure sign that the language is doing well \u2013 and hopefully will continue to thrive, into the next generation and beyond.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Daniel W Hieber<\/a> is PhD Candidate in Linguistics at University of California, Santa Barbara<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel W Hieber, University of California, Santa Barbara In the summer of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, a 21-year-old linguist named Morris Swadesh set out for Louisiana to record the area\u2019s Native American languages, which were disappearing rapidly. Morris and his peers were in a race against time to document them, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":6523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6524,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions\/6524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}