*As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/books/06language.html?ref=books
John McWhorter in his linguistics 101 lectures and books, states that language revival borders on impossible; that the revival of Hebrew was a fluke due to several factors (Culture highly based on literacy, new country with people returning from different lands that need a new common language) that won’t be present in reviving Native American languages, who are doing it mostly for what might be called ethnic pride.
What are the chances of languages like Unkechaug, with no current native speakers, being revived to the point where native speakers can continue the language to future generations? Based on McWhorter’s view, I find the efforts profiled in the Times to be doomed, but on the other hand, it is romantic indeed to see a langauge arise from the grave and return to its people.
I can only say that aside form hobbyists and a vey dedicated group, it will be very hard for this to succeed.
You need much more tha simply learning the language, you need things to use it. Books, newspapers, TV, radio, internet.
If not, and this takes lots of effort and money, it’s simply romantic, nice but doomed.
Cornish was extinct from 1799, when its last primary speaker died, until sometime in the later 20th century when its revival was a significant part of Kernovian nationalism. Irish never went that far, but was largely confined as an active everyday tongue to the west of the island, and losing ground to English each year, until it became a policy of the Republic government to bring it back into regular use.
There are other similar examples. Aramaic, for example, ramains a living language, but the majority of people fluent in Aramaic are Biblical scholars. That is, there are more people who learned it to work with the Bible in its original language than remain as native speakers.
I’m not sure that really qualifies as a “living” language. I think there has to be at least some children who grow up with that language as their first language for it be living. That’s why the story of the revival of Hebrew is so remarkable.
I think it would quickly run into the same issues as a revival of latin would have. There has been so much more development in terms of technonlogy since they’ve been used as languages that I think anything done with them would not remain ‘pure’ , if such a thing could be said, for long.
Ethnologue lists over 70 Native American languages in the U.S. that are endangered, but not yet extinct. If there is not the interest to save them, how can we hope to revive dead languages that have been irrelevant for 200 years?
Very interesting, and thanks! I was working on the basis of Modern Western Aramaic, considering the Eastern dialects to be “Syriac” and a completely separate language, in making that assertion. (As of 25 years or so ago, there were also a couple of villages near Nablus that spoke Western Aramaic; I don’t know if that’s still the case or not.)
I was going to mention Kernowek - but is there the same ethnic impetus for these? What are the numbers of tribespeople? 1700 total? Are they* all * keen?
Also, Cornish (and Hebrew) had surviving, closely related languages that were still living. Do these ones?
Lastly, off-topic, but Shinnecock sounds more like a prohibited wrestling move. “I want a good clean fight, no shinnecocking…”
Even if you take purity as a goal, and you really don’t have to, what counts as purity? The attempt to revive Latin as a spoken language encompasses diverse strains of opinion on the matter, and it takes a certain critical level of actual praxis for competing possibilities for new vocabulary to shake out. But encompassing new technologies is mostly a matter of vocabulary, and vocabulary is not really the essence of a language. New vocabulary is more like an after-market enhancement. Decals and shit, maybe a spoiler.
If what they have for Shinnecock is essentially a small bit of vocabulary, then the language is lost. I’m all for trying anyway, distilling grammar out of what cues are embeded in morphology of a language largely recorded from an English-speaker’s setting down what letters best corresponded in his era of English to the sounds he heard a native speaker make. But it’s a Jurassic Park sort of project – they’re going to have to splice in DNA from other languages. And I’m fine with that, too, but it will not really be the lost language. It’ll be mostly a constructed language designed to cement a cultural identity. And frankly, I feel that’s a more worthy project than constructing a language for a fictional alien species such as the Klingons or the Na’vi (and even that I’m not exactly against). It won’t work, but it’s a project worth failing at.
That is, there are more people who learned it to work with the Bible in its original language than remain as native speakers.