Indigenous California Language Survival

I would love to have an easy grace with languages, with picking up and using unfamiliar languages, especially. I’m good at English. I’ve studied Spanish, Portuguese, American Sign Language. I learned a lot from my studies, though I can’t claim any communicative fluency. But I would love to learn a language native to where I grew up, native to California. I doubt it will happen. I read work in translation, the next best thing?, and I am grateful to those who are able to bring meaning over from one language to another. 

Sadly, of all the endangered things in this world, the languages of indigenous peoples are especially close to the edge. So I was pleased to read in a book of English versions of California indigenous oral literature that robust effort is being put into keeping alive many of the source languages. 

One of the most promising of recent efforts to turn things around is California’s own Master/Apprentice Language Learning Program. (The MALLP is conducted and administered by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival … which is an affiliate of the Seventh Generation Fund, an important umbrella organization for a number of Native American activist groups. … Since its first season in 1993, the Master/Apprentice program has initiated training sessions for more than seventy master/apprentice pairs, involving (at the time of writing) twenty-five languages — most of them down to their last handful of fluent speakers — with more being added every year.

There’s also some hope that languages that currently have no speakers who grew up speaking it can be revived from “fieldnotes, recordings, and publications of the linguists who worked with the last generation of fluent elders.” Hats off to anyone who takes on that goal. It will require dedication! 

source: Surviving Through the Days: a California Indian reader edited by Herbert W. Luthin. 2002. University of California Press, Berkeley CA