Languages In the World (60 page)

The Algonquian language family once stretched continuously from present-day North Carolina north through central Canada and west to present-day Montana. Its languages – Cree, Massachusset, Menonimi, and many others – were as distinctive from one another as the cultural groups who spoke them. Many of the languages were lost to the effects of European colonialism, but many others have managed to survive, if tenuously. One of the surviving languages is Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin), which is still spoken by about 55,000 people as a series of mostly mutually intelligible varieties throughout the Ojibwe homeland, the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States.

Like most Native American languages, Ojibwe is considered extremely endangered. The number of speakers is considered relatively high for a Native American language, but the speakers are spread out across a great swath of territory, from the Dakotas, northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the United States, to as far east as Quebec in Canada. As the language has dwindled in number in the United States, efforts to revitalize it have become a top priority in many communities. On the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, the Niigaane Ojibwemowin Immersion School opened its doors to Ojibwe children for the first time in 2003. From kindergarten to the sixth grade, children receive Ojibwe-language instruction in all curricular areas. The goal is to produce the next generation of Ojibwe speakers in the community. Similar efforts are being made in Ojibwe communities throughout the Great Lakes region.

Margaret Noodin is a professor, poet, and scholar of Native American studies living and working in the state of Wisconsin. She is also a leader in the efforts to revitalize Anishinaabemowin, the local name for Ojibwe. We invited Professor Noodin to tell the story of the Anishinaabemowin language in her words. She sent us the following poem, written in Ojibwe and with an English translation:

 

We also asked Professor Noodin to describe the hopes, challenges, pleasures, and fears of the Anishinaabemowin revitalization effort. This is what she told us:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I walk into Anishinaabemowin language class and talk with brilliant, hard-working students who represent both the near and distant future. They are the long shadows of their ancestors' past as the people lived through evolution, migration and colonization. Some days we count by twos or tens just to prove we can push our minds to play outside English. Then, we talk of seasons and stories and pretend to be people of the past or animals who speak, always playing with words, description, and conjugation. We talk of the way we build sentences from the center, the way our lives and our earth expand with ancient and unstoppable centrifugal force. Then, I walk out, we all leave, and I can't see whether or not we've made a difference at all. Like the Sun and the Moon and the tides of my poetry, the forces that control our lives and our language are not visible at the micro level. I can't see if that hour has become a part of memory, if our laughter or frustration will ripple forward into our lives, if the Anishinaabe way of speaking will be pulled into the next generation … or not.

At home I sing with my daughters and friends. We call ourselves Miskwaasining Nagamojig, the Swamp Singers, because the Anishinaabe are people of the great lakes and great forests and vast networks of rivers and swamps that make up the places between. For centuries, the women in Anishinaabe communities have been especially attentive to the water. There are words for smooth or choppy water, words for deep and dangerous water and words for the bright beautiful stuff of life we all need to survive. The language carries the echo of
nibii
‘water' in
niibiish
‘the leaf'. It carries an understanding of the waved and rhythmic way we submerge our consciousness in
nibaa
‘to sleep' and the way we disintegrate back into the cycle of life in
nibo
the word for ‘death.' This is the way every language weaves its epistemology into language, layering ideas and perspectives with sound and syntax. This is the way we arrange meaning in patterns of communication that lead to lyric ceremonies, celebrations of shared experience, songs of meeting by the water, singing with the water. We sing in Anishinaabemowin because we want to save these words and ways of knowing, ways of helping one another heal, stand strong, bear pain, forgive, and let go. When used regularly by real people as a living language, any language can be the tissue that builds the bones of identity. In one of our songs we say,

 

There are many lessons in these words. Shkaakaamikwe literally implies a feminine ability to renew, neither the word for ‘mother'
gashe
nor ‘earth'
aki
are in the name, but the reciprocal relationship is clear. Further evidence of the relationship is the verb form that shows two animate beings knowing and hearing one another.

To share songs like this one and stores related to it, to reach beyond the places we can touch and see, we created a website, an address in the ether, commonly referred to as the cloud. The site
²
is a commons that connects us like the great inland seas that surround
us. We post words and sounds in Michigan and Wisconsin for cousins in Ontario and Minnesota. We reach across two big nations, the United States and Canada, as if they did not exist and sometimes we hear from faraway friends who are working with their own languages in Ireland, Wales, China, New Zealand or Siberia. Over 3500 connect with us via the internet, and we consider all the files to be open archives for the future.

Our work with language is to gather the data, respond to the tides, stay on the paths that keep us suspended. Our words are an orbit we'd like to think we maintain, but perhaps it is the cycle of exchange that actually maintains us.

We thank Professor Noodin for sharing her story.

In the future, speakers across the world will increasingly be faced with a decision that many of our readers may find impossible to imagine: the decision to trade in the language of the home for a language of prestige. As hyperacceleration of the world's languages continues apace, this decision will be faced not only by a small minority groups pressured into acquiescing to larger regional languages – speakers of Karen pressured to learn Burmese, for example – but also for speakers of large regional languages, who will feel pressure to learn the globalizing languages – speakers of Burmese who experience the urgency of Mandarin or English. Neither politicians, who may wish for speakers to give up minority languages, nor linguists, who may wish for speakers to keep them, can decide. The decision quite simply belongs to the speakers who are faced with making language decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Except in the cases of sudden and radical death, outlined above, the statistics we have provided throughout this chapter about language loss are the result of decisions made by speakers to either abandon their mother tongue or not pass it down to their children, or both. The future of the world's languages is therefore a future based in hundreds of millions of individual decisions. But what does it mean to make a choice about something so fundamental to identity as language?

First, the decision to abandon a language is often made in the context of harmful language ideologies that are rooted in the interests of those in positions of political, economic, and cultural power. That is, ideologies that articulate the value of majority languages while demoting the value of minority languages exist because powerful individuals, groups, and institutions benefit from them.

Second, harmful ideologies about language tend to be linked to other ideological formations having to do with race, class, tribe, region, and nation, which further promote inequality and consolidate power for those who already have it, while relegating to the margins those speakers who already reside there. In other words, speakers of minority language varieties often experience multiple forms of oppression at the same time. The decision to abandon a marginal language for an ostensibly more prestigious one may be perceived as the most feasible way of avoiding broad social stigma.

Third, language decisions are often presented to speakers as false dichotomies: give up X to acquire Y. Acquiring Swahili does not actually
require
the loss of Vidunda, for example, though this may well be the impression children get from attending schools in which Swahili is the only language of instruction.

Fourth, choices about language are often presented with false guarantees: give up the home language, and success will follow. It may well be the case that English will give a speaker more linguistic capital than Nepali in the linguistic marketplace, but then again it may not. Acquiring Swahili may well improve the economic conditions of those in Vidunda Ward, but then it also might not.

Language is always catching up to the conditions that set it in motion in the first place. As a result of the last 100,000+ years, language has constantly looped itself not only around an individual's neuronal pathways but equally significantly around the speakers in a community, the landscapes they live in, and the educational and political structures they create. Sound inventories increase or decrease and/or might change character, shifting from nontonal to tonal. Lexical items know nothing of linguistic borders. Particular syntactic structures may arise out of the pressures of multilingual residual zones. Belief systems spread through religions and economies. In the end, individual and individual communities have always had a choice about what language(s) they speak and how they speak, whether they knew it or not.

We urge speakers to empower themselves with information in order to make the best choices concerning the survival of their language(s). We appreciate that while not all speakers are eager to rescue their imperiled languages from extinction, we believe language death nevertheless to be a global problem deserving of political, intellectual, and humanitarian attention. In writing this book, one of the things that struck us most powerfully was the magnitude of this problem, both in terms of the rate of disappearance of the world's languages and in terms of the burden of language death, which disproportionally falls on the shoulders of those who speak minority languages.

For others of us not speaking an endangered language, we advocate additive multilingualism or bidialectalism, depending on where you live. We acknowledge that dignity is tied to identity, and identity is tied to language. Therefore, no matter what language or language variety you speak, you should never have to feel
vergonha
, that is, the feeling of shame for speaking a socially stigmatized language variety, or the feeling of shame of having given up the home language due to social pressure to do so. We cannot tell leaders and policy makers around the world what decisions to make about language matters in their countries or regions, but we can ask them to become informed about some of the basic working of language, what we are calling
the language loop
, and of language communities and their gifts, needs, and interests.

Above all, at the end of this book, we want to state that linguistic diversity is not a problem to be managed. It is a fact of life to be celebrated.