There were three hundred indigenous languages in the U.S., but there are now only one hundred and seventy-five. The Indigenous Language Institute believes that only twenty indigenous languages will be spoken by 2050. Many American Indians have been trying to revive languages because “language is a cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values.” Bruce Cole is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and views language as “the DNA of a culture.” Language often gives insight into ancestors’ minds and lives.
It is difficult to bring a language back because so few people speak it, and new generations must continue to speak it. A society must use the language to function in order to sustain it. For example, the Hebrew language was unspoken for two thousand years, but the creation of the State of Israel instigated its revival and is often used in Jewish societies.
Shinnecock and Unkechaug will be especially difficult to revive because there are few records of the language. They have to rely on the family of Algonquian languages, of which Shinnecock and Unkechaug are a part, to fill in the missing gaps. They are aiming to discover the sound, vocabulary, and structure of the language before they introduce it to the community.
The full article is here.
Here is a map of where many Indian tribes lived in the Northeast, including the Shinnecock and Unkechaug Nations on Long Island.
The Unquachog Tribe is one of the four Quiripi tribes that share a similar language. There are only four documents left that use their language, so researchers are not positive if they all used the same language or related languages or different dialects of one language. European diseases devastated Indians in the Northeast of the United States, so the survivors came together and lost the identities of their individual tribes.
This website has links to more information about the Quiripi tribes, samples of their language, and maps of where they lived.
The Shinnecock Indian Nation created a computer program that will help revive and store the Shinnecock language so that it can be taught to future generations. The woman who owns the company that created the software has ties to the Shinnecock Nation all the way back to the seventeenth century. She is doing all she can to help restore the language because she knows that most Indian tribes are losing their last native speakers. The program can record words, phrases, songs, videos, and illustrations. Now, speakers of other languages than Native American languages want to purchase the software to retain their languages as well.
The full article about the computer program is here.
This website has more information, including the history and culture, about the Shinnecock Indian Nation.
This story is unique because it discusses a language that has been lost in the United States. Many Europeans that immigrated to the United States adopted English, but their languages are still spoken in their respective countries. The Native Americans, on the other hand, have completely lost their languages because the United States was their original home. I wonder if the Indians’ efforts have come too late. Now that the younger generations are speaking English and society is functioning around the English language, it will be much harder to bring back the Shinnecock and Unquachog languages. Also, the computer system seems very fabricated and impersonal. If they want to retain the language in order to understand the culture of the tribes, will a computer program be able to express the language in a way that also conveys cultural meaning? And will the people who learn the language feel the same connection to their roots as those who grew up speaking the language?
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