March 26, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A New Mexico charity is harnessing modern tools in the struggle to revitalize some very old and endangered languages.
Of the more than 400 languages that were once spoken by Native Americans in the United States, roughly 175 are still spoken today, according to Inée Yang Slaughter, executive director of the Indigenous Language Institute, in Santa Fe.
Of those, she says, only about 20 languages have speakers of all ages.
Native American groups, she says, cite the lack of materials available in their languages as one of the biggest hurdles they face as they try to teach younger people. So the Indigenous Language Institute has developed a series of workshops that help teachers, language activists, and others create books and videos to fill the void.
Key to the institute’s workshops is software that the group has developed to make it easier to type in Native American languages.
Only a handful of the languages, like Cherokee, have their own alphabet. Most others adopted the English alphabet and added special marks to denote sounds specific to their languages. The resulting characters can be complicated — such as an upside down Y with a slash through it.
For a long time, someone would have to go through printed documents and publications and add the markings by hand. Early computer programs made the process easier, but creating some of the characters took multiple keystrokes.
To ease the process, the Indigenous Language Institute has developed software — Languagegeek Native Keyboard and Font — that can be programmed for different languages and streamlines typing. Ms. Slaughter says that no symbol requires more than two keystrokes.
Participants in the institute’s workshops create a wide array of materials. Teachers often work on storybooks, coloring books, or textbooks for their students. Young people have brought their own drawings to make cartoons, while older adults record family or traditional stories that they want to pass down to younger relatives.
Ms. Slaughter says the group’s workshops often spark intergenerational collaboration. At a recent event, Joseph Geronimo, an older Apache man, wasn’t comfortable using computers, so he brought a younger member of his community, Walter Scott, to help him.
Together they created a video that tells the story of why Apache men wear their hair long. (The video is available on the institute’s YouTube channel.)
The fear of saying something incorrectly and being criticized often makes young people hesitant to try to learn and speak their languages, says Ms. Slaughter.
But, she says, when they contribute their technology skills at the workshops, they also pick up the language indirectly. “There’s a very gentle and natural way that language is transmitted,” she says, “and the techno-savvy youth is actually learning the language.”
For more information: Go to http://www.ilinative.org.
