Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: thoughtful

The Life of Languages

I found this article about portrayals of Native American languages.  It includes a splendid YouTube video of a young (!) man describing his iPod (!!) in Navajo.  If you go out to the YT page and look in the right sidebar, you'll find a lot of other Navajo-speaking videos.

I love languages.  I'm delighted to see people using the Internet to help keep their languages not just alive, but growing.  That means somebody has to sit down and think about, "How do we want to say this new thing in our language?  Is there already a good word for it?  Do we want to borrow a word straight from some other language?  Do we want to translate it?  Or do we want to invent a uniquely Navajo (or whatever) way of talking about this thing?"  Sometimes it'll go one way, sometimes another.  The important thing is to keep a language current enough to discuss what is happening in the world right now, which helps young people perceive the language as relevant and valuable, so that it will continue.  The most meaningful thing anyone can do to continue their ethnic culture is to learn and speak their heritage language.

Interestingly, Navajo is a language for which I have a guidebook but very little audio exposure.  It's kind of daunting on paper and has a reputation with teeth.  But listening to it?  With stacked English/Navajo subtitles?  It doesn't sound much harder than, say, Lakota or Cherokee.  I had no trouble picking out the phonemes ("Oh hey, that must be the hissed "l" one...") and repeated words or roots.  So, of course, I had to go back to YouTube and browse some of the other videos.  Every minute given to an endangered language matters -- every click of a webpage about it, every word learned, every insight into a culture revealed by a turn of phrase.  There are many pieces of cultural lore that I treasure: arts, crafts, music, etc.  But it is the languages of the world that show me new thoughts and perspectives.  I never want that to be lost, and we are losing languages because people don't pass them on.  So I try to get other folks interested in languages, not just the most popular couple of dozen, but the thousands of other languages that are spoken by smaller populations.
Tags: ethnic studies, linguistics, networking, video
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  • 9 comments
fayanora

fayanora

September 5 2010, 22:46:59 UTC 10 years ago

Passing this along on Twitter!
ysabetwordsmith

Thank you!

ysabetwordsmith

September 5 2010, 23:49:25 UTC 10 years ago

I appreciate the signal boost.
estaratshirai

estaratshirai

September 5 2010, 23:27:12 UTC 10 years ago

That is so awesome. On one of my passes through the Southwest, I was lucky enough to stumble across a museum exhibit on the WWII codetalkers, and in the museum store was a book and cassette on basic Navaho. I bought it out of sheer joy that it even existed, but I have to admit that I have yet to learn any words.
ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

September 5 2010, 23:37:06 UTC 10 years ago

I love the codetalker project. It was a brilliant move. The Navajo people are very proud of their contribution to history.
estaratshirai

Re: Yes...

estaratshirai

September 5 2010, 23:43:35 UTC 10 years ago

It's one of my favorite bits of history.
red_trillium

red_trillium

September 6 2010, 07:31:41 UTC 10 years ago

That is interesting, thank you for sharing.
dichroic

dichroic

September 6 2010, 07:36:20 UTC 10 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, Navajo is unique among Native American languages in one important way: the number of its speakers is actually *increasing*. There are something like 168000 speakers (I got the number from WIkipedia, but the article seems knowledgeable) and there are still lots of people who speak it as an everyday language, in some cases as their first language. (I learned this when I took a grad-level linguistics class at ASU. In fact, one fo the other students was a Navajo woman who was taking the class in order to become an ESL teacher on the reservation.)
elalyr

elalyr

September 7 2010, 02:58:20 UTC 10 years ago

Tangentially, did you see this article in the NYT magazine? It's called Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" There's a neat part involving an Australian aboriginal language called Guugu Yimithirr and its lack of egocentric direction/location descriptors.
ysabetwordsmith

Hmm...

ysabetwordsmith

September 7 2010, 04:54:50 UTC 10 years ago

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. In my experience, thought influences language and language influences thought; it's a reflexive relationship. What we consider important gets encoded into our language; we can make up new words if we decide we need them. But our language defines what is already easy to think about or discuss, as well as what we must pay attention to for grammatical reasons (such as gender or number or time). When I'm thinking in different languages -- I think differently. That effect has been described by many people who think in multiple languages, rather than translating in their heads. Just knowing another language doesn't necessarily do the trick.