Linguistics 101; 2005
"To lose one's language is to lose one's culture," said Tony Johnson in 2004; 33 years old, he has been fighting for a piece of his for more than seven years. This particular piece is the language of his ancestors, Chinook. He has put together 6 annual Chinook workshops which attract historians, tribal members, locals, and linguists. This was once the language of a strong tribe, who controlled a wide region of land around the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, who inhabited regions of the valley east of the Cascade Range. Native speakers lived, fished, traded and spoke Chinook for thousands of years in the Pacific Northwest. There was a time when a friendly "Klahowya," which meant hello, would open the doors of hospitality for any traveler: two centuries ago it was spoken by over 100,000 traders, tribe members, and explorers from northern California to Alaska.
They had two languages; one was pure Chinook, spoken by those who learned it as their first language, and one was called Chinook Wawa or Chinook Jargon, which was a trade language. The Chinook tribe had a lot of influence in part because its language was the one whose terms
happened to become used as the base for the pidgin trade language in the area, by which the Chinook and their neighbors could communicate and share markets. The pure form of Chinook was found in 1977 to have a population of only 12 speakers of the Kiksht dialect (1996), down from a possible 300 (1977); these are clearly not good signs. Pure Chinook has several dialects, Klatsop, Clackama, and Kiksht; it has both Subject-Object-Verb forms like the English which has replaced it to such a degree, and also Verb-Subject-Object forms.
Chinook Wawa, the trade pidgin form of Chinook, had a much wider reach. In the 1700s when a lot of European traders started to appear, it picked up a lot of words from Canadian French as well as British and (eventually) American English. It's effectiveness as a universal trade language showed as Chinese immigrants started using it when they first moved into the area. Some words in local English dialects were adopted from Chinook, words like "snookums," which means strong. Wawa is an agglutinous contact language. When the ancestors of the modern Chinook were moved with many other tribes to the Grand Ronde Reservation, they were not officially recognized, but mashed in with the rest. However, their language became the major language on the reservation: these were many uprooted tribes with many different languages, but many were neighbors and members of the same trading community: the trading community which used Chinook Wawa.
"It was the language used when someone courted their mate, when someone went to the post office, when someone went to the sweat lodge," Tony Johnson said. Even with these prospects, this language was found in 1962 to have 100 speakers, all over the age of fifty years; the language was dying. Tony has been working for the Confederated Ronde tribes of Oregon for more than seven years trying to save Chinook, and the light at the end of the tunnel which seemed to be flickering out is again growing bright. A first step was developing a written alphabet: this became the collaboration between Johnson and friend Henry Zenk, a Portland linguist. They also developed a program that would type these characters on computers; recently the pair put together a 2,600 word dictionary.
Johnson's desire to save his heritage doesn't stop with a book on a shelf, some written record to prove that it had actually happened. His goal is to revitalize the language. He's created a teaching program that's becoming a national model; he's even received a certificate from the state of Oregon for teaching this language. Three other licenses also have been issued: one to Zenk, the other two to tribal members who learned Chinuk-wawa through classes Johnson taught on the reservation.
Four year olds in tribal classrooms are being taught Chinook in an immersive environment. The program emphasizes a master/apprentice situation. Because English is not allowed in class, students are encouraged to teach each other, correct one another when they lapse into English or offer the Chinook words up to aide one another. This aspect of the program serves to integrate a pattern which will cause the language to spread: these children will teach each other, and eventually become fluent; it will become a part of their lives and then eventually the lives of others.
Tribal spokesman Brent Merrill, 43, is one of the other certified Chinook teachers. When he was a child, the language was used by elders when they did not want the children to understand what they were talking about. The program has been so successful that children on the reservation have begun to use Chinook-wawa to keep secrets from the adults. Because children are the ones with the potential to carry the language into the modern world again, and spread it on to their children, this is one of the best possible signs for the survival of the Chinook language. It has gone from a language which was waiting for it's last speakers to die to one flourishing from the mouths of babes.
Websites used
http://www.encyclopedia.com/
http://www.nationmaster.com/
http://www.nationmaster.com/
http://www.sil.org/sociolx/
http://www.ethnologue.com/#GOF
http://www.suite101.com/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.
No comments:
Post a Comment