Stabilizing Indigenous Languages

The last time many of us were assembled at this university Dang Pham, Deputy Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, indicated that the United States Government recognizes a special debt of responsibility to assist Native American peoples to foster and strengthen their languages. This second conference at Northern Arizona University was to be a more concrete step in that direction, listening to ideas, perhaps formulating plans that could benefit from such support, and I am sure that all of you are going to be very alert, just as I am, are going to be very alert, to see if any of the promises that were made at the first meeting will materialize. It is an understatement to say that I am pleased and honored to be here. The opportunity to interact with American Indian languages and their activists is an experience that very few sociolinguists in the United States have been able to have. The reason old-timers like myself still come to these meetings is because sometimes we hear a younger colleague saying things that make us understand language maintenance even better than before, let alone finding out what they are doing, which is what we really have to keep up with. But it will take more than conferences to keep most American Indian languages from becoming extinct. If all it took was conferences, then the languages would not be in the sad condition that most of them are in now because many of them have been exposed to anthropologists and conferences before. If not conferences, what then? Lots of different approaches have been tried. Is there anything that can be learned from these past efforts, not just among American Indians, but all over the world? A huge proportion, perhaps even the majority, of the world’s languages are faced by the very same problems, and people all over the world have tried the best they could. So what can be learned from all that experience? I spend my summer and winter months at Stanford in the Linguistics Department and my fall and spring days in New York on the campus of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. I told one of my medical colleagues there that I would be talking today on the topic “What works? What doesn’t?” So my medical colleague, hearing that, said, “Oh, what works? What doesn’t? What disease are you into?” So I looked him straight in the eye and I said, “Lack of sufficient inter-generational mother-tongue transmission.” And he said, “Oh, you must be in speech pathology.” He was not too far wrong, except that most of the pathology that I am into is sociolinguistic in nature.