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Indigenous Languages

Responses to shifts toward dominant languages and the increase in language disappearance have included: “(i) language documentation,[...] and digital archiving of collected data, (ii) establishment of funding bodies to finance documentation projects and [...]  language revitalization work, (iii) creation of language education programs by government bodies and other interested parties, and (iv) training of documentary linguists and language teachers.”

Rights

Although they exist in a written form, established by the Barcelona Declaration and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, language rights are not necessarily recognized, and in fact are often neglected by individual national governments themselves. While some indigenous languages have official status, many are denied legal recognition. This treatment underscores the need for universal language rights.

According to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, indigenous peoples maintain the follwoing language rights:

• The right to be educated in their mother tongue.
• The right to have indigenous languages recognized in constitutions and laws.
• The right to live free from discrimination on the grounds of language.
• The right to establish and have access to media in indigenous languages.

Disappearance

A research project, commissioned by UNESCO has established six different degrees of endangerment, which are all distinct from the category of Safe languages, which are known and spoken by all generations of the particular group. The first group, Stable yet threatened languages, is comprised of those languages where, again the language is known and spoken by all generations, with uninterrupted transmission from generation to generation, but there is an important way in which multilingualism between the indigenous language and a society-dominant language is threatening the maintenance of the indigenous language. The next set of endangered languages are Vulnerable languages, which are spoken by a majority but not all children of a particular group; vulnerable languages may also be restricted in use such as solely for the home or with parents and grandparents. Definitely endangered languages, on the other hand, are those that  children no longer learn as a first language in the home although they hear it from their parents who remain the youngest generation of its speakers. Severely endangered languages are those languages where the only speakers are grandparents and older generations; parents do not speak or teach the language to their children, and they don’t speak it themselves. Critically endangered languages are those languages whose youngest speakers are great-grandparents or older; these speakers do not use the language on a day to day basis and sometimes recall only parts of the language. The final category of the highest degree of endangerment is that of those languages which are considered extinct, meaning that there are no living speakers or persons with knowledge of the language.

Although the causes of endangerment are varied, they often include political repression, including attempt by government poolicies to suppress indigenous culture and language. Outside of past and present active attempts to decrease the use of indigenous languages, speakers of indigenous languages may feel pressured to speak the dominant languages of their particular society, or they may feel discouraged from passing on a mother-tongue to their children for lack of confidence in its utility or fear of discrimination that they will face.

Revitalization Programs

Language revitalization is the active attempt to restore the functionality of a language by facilitating its learning in order to develop more speakers; the languages revitalization process may be undertaken in the case of  varying levels of endangerment for a particular language, and it often involves the development of some type of official, structured program to facilitate the learning, speaking or memorializing of an endangered language.  Such programs  have prompted the development of innovative strategies for language preservation, especially with regard to authenticity and changing demographics..Revitalization programs for indigenous languages typically take the form of one or a combination of five different approaches. Across the world there exist programs based in schools, programs for children that are based outside of school, adult educational programs that center around practical use of language, programs involving the development of written or audio documentation and educational materials, and home-based programs.

School-based programs can take many different forms in themselves. They may consist of the instruction of an indigenous language as a foreign language, similar to other subjects taught in school. They may also be part of bilingual education methods, or they may be constructed as a full immersion program. An example of such immersion is the development of “language nests” like tribal-run preschools, in Canada where children learn the aboriginal mother-tongues of the Inuit, First Nations and Metis. These different types of school-based programs are distinct in structure as well as effectiveness with regard to the goals and levels of fluency reached by participants.

Programs that are for children, but which are not based in school, are often held during after-school hours or during summer holidays. Within these programs, there is often more opportunity to combine language acquisition with recreation, but there is a substantial need for in-home reinforcement or reinforcement during the school year and during school hours.

Adult educational programs with a focus on the learning of an indigenous language frequently involve evening classes and less frequently involve situations of immersion. An example of such a program is that of a community recreation program developed in Oahu, Hawaii, during which participants used the Hawaiian language in routine community activities such as volleyball or cookouts.

Programs of documentation are more often used for languages at a high degree of endangeredness and for which an acquisition or learning program would not be appropriate because there are few to no children or young adults that speak the language. Programs of this type involve discovering what existing material or documentation of a language consists of, increasing access to existing materials for a particular language community. Outside of this discovery and increase to access, these programs focus on the development of new teaching devices which might take the form of audio recordings, dictionaries, books and video.

Home-based programs within language revitalization involve the designation of an indigenous language as a primary language in homes; this involves cases in which parents learned the indigenous language as a second language and choose to use it in their homes with their children from a young age.

Revitalization techniques have also been subject to design-based research; new responses to indigenous language revitalization have been developed to more effectively restore the function of such languages in society, such as using heritage language learners in the design of materials for education in second-language or immersion programs at schools. This combines the methods of school based revitalization with documentation and materials development, to prevent the exclusion of indigenous voices in the process. New methodology has been proposed to ensure the incorporation of indigenous points of knowledge creation and to challenge traditional assumptions about the knowledge that is produced and reproduced in schools and communities.

North America- U.S. and Canada

Of 300 to 500 languages indigenous to what is now the United States and Canada, 210 are still spoken. The causes and influences of the endangerment of North American Indian languages are similar to those in both Central and South America, involving: colonial conquest, genocide, and government policies designed to eradicate indigenous language use. These processes of language extermination were facilitated by military action and power as well as compulsory education in the form of Indian boarding and residential schools, institutions that were prevalent in Canada and the United States.

Of the 280 native languages once present in the continental U.S. almost half of them are extinct, and those surviving are endangered. There are several programs aimed at language revitalization; however, UNESCO cites three reason that these languages are still being lost on a large scale. The first is the small number of speakers for some of them; another is the loss of language through union with another tribe and the learning of their language instead. A last reason is the pressure to abandon native languages for English for educational or economic benefits. Language revitalization projects in the U.S. are often concerned with increasing number of speakers, increasing speaking of the native language amongst younger people and using language recovery to reinforce cultural identity. These revitalization projects take many forms, including those mentioned above, for both languages with surviving speakers and those without. One success might be considered the programs of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation.

The indigenous languages of Canada include those of the Inuit, the First Nations, and the Metis. The number of indigenous languages in Canada differs depending on the classification system used. Inuktitut is the general name for the dialects of the Inuit spread across Canada and Greenland, although these said dialects can vary greatly over distance. First Nations languages are numerous and diverse with the largest three being Cree, Ojibway and Oji-Cree. The Metis speak some of these same languages as well as ones that are unique to them. The survival of Canada’s aboriginal languages is heavily influenced by their transmission from one generation to another, for children are the primary source of aboriginal language growth in Canada. The continuation of these languages is thus dependent upon daily use in the home. Such use in the home may be prohibited by the fact that parents no longer speak the language or the language has never been the primary language of communciation between parents and chidlren. One might consider the situation of a parent who was prohibited from speakign a native language in the generations of those in the Indian residential school system who now has a child learning the language through a bilingual program in school. (Learning aboriginal languages as a second language has emerged as a trend with regard to language revitalization in Canada.) However, many institutions have developed to protect indigenous languages in Canada. The creation of the Aboriginal Languages Initiative by the Canadian government has helped to facilitate different methods of revitalization, and there even exists a television network and programming in aboriginal languages. In Nunavut and the Northwest territories, Inuit stands as an official language in addition to English and French.

Mexico and Central America

Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl in central Mexico, and Mayan languages in Chiapas and Yucatan, date back to pre-columbian times. When Spanish colonization began, these languages were overtaken in Mexico by Castilian Spanish. In years as recent as 2006, changes have been made to the Mexican constitution, education laws, and other federal laws, recognizing and facilitating the right of indigenous populations to preserve, enrich and be educated in their native languages. Guatemala has a substantial indigenous populations and provinces that run entirely in both Maya languages and Spanish. In spite of a law declaring support indigenous languages, little to no concrete government measures have manifested, and many Maya abandon their native languages for Spanish when they migrate. However, bilingual education and support for Maya languages by NGO's like Wuqu Kawoq presently improve the normalization, valuation and revitalization of these langauges. Honduras has had similar, limited support for its indigenous languages of Miskitos and Garifuna. In El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, there are very small indigenous populations, and some hope for the revival of indigenous languages that were nearly eradicated with conquest. In Panama, some long-present indigenous languages and settlements were maintained alongside Spanish settlement; with well-documented surviving indigenous languages and bilingual education, the indigenous languages are said to be developing as official languages with Spanish.

South America

According Grondona and Campbell, 108 language families are present in South America, constituting a quarter of the world’s “linguistic genetic diversity,” and the approximate numbers of indigenous languages in some South American countries are as follows: Argentina 15, Bolivia 25, Colombia 65, Peru 60, and Venezuela 30. Some South American indigenous languages even extend  into the Caribbean and northward out of SA territory. The loss or extinction of languages in South America is largely attributed to political, cultural, and linguistic conquest. Despite the current survival of more than 400 languages in South America, these said languages are unevenly distributed geographically throughout the continent, and there are large areas of land that have lost all indigenous language completely. The increasing endangerment of these languages in South America is due to low numbers of remaining speakers or a struggle/lack of desire to pass down the languages to upcoming generations. This has led to a shift toward the dominant European languages of Spanish and Portuguese in these communities. However, while some indigenous languages have been “lost beyond retrieval,” the preservation and revival of indigenous languages has become the interest and concern of academics and governments.