Indigenous Language Initiative helps revive ailing languages
By Katharine Dunn
In the old days, the Lardil people of Mornington Island, Australia, just off the country’s northern coast, knew the stories and traditions of their ancestors.
Indigenous Language Initiative helps revive ailing languages
By Katharine Dunn
In the old days, the Lardil people of Mornington Island, Australia, just off the country’s northern coast, knew the stories and traditions of their ancestors. They spread those traditions in Lardil and, on occasion, in Damin, a sacred language reserved for young men’s initiation ceremonies. The Lardil had no words for numbers above “three,” because they weren’t needed; resources were shared and there was no currency. When white people arrived about 90 years ago, Lardil children were placed in schools and forced to speak English. And the culture began to die.
“Growing up Lardil [today], you think being a good person means being as much like a white person as you can,” says Norvin Richards, a professor of linguistics who has been working with the Lardil community for nearly a decade. White people now hold most of the island’s jobs, and poverty and crime are widespread in Lardil communities. Of the 1,200 Lardil on the island, only one or two remain who are fully fluent in the language.
“Language death in [Lardil] communities is the least of their problems,” admits Richards. “But I’m trained in that, so I do what I can.” He returns to the island every year or two, and he’s now finishing a book of traditional stories in Lardil and English. Language plights like the Lardil’s are “playing out in a similar way in communities around the world,” says Richards, who is troubled by this trend not only because he believes oral literatures, like art, are valuable for the unique perspectives they offer on the world, but also because he sees minority-language survival as a human-rights issue. Many languages are endangered because of the political and cultural dominance of other languages (often English). By century’s end, Richards estimates, between half and 90 percent of the world’s languages could disappear.
In response to these concerns, MIT’s linguistics department recently launched the Indigenous Languages Initiative, a two-year master’s program for members of indigenous communities whose languages are dead or dying. The program’s goal is to give native speakers the tools to revive their languages. Stephanie Fielding of the Mohegan tribe in Connecticut, the program’s first student, graduated in May.
Training Native Speakers
Many endangered languages have been studied by linguists at MIT because of Ken Hale, a linguistics professor who died in 2001. Hale, who spoke about 50 languages, traveled to rural communities in countries ranging from Australia to Nicaragua to work on language revival. And starting in the 1960s, he also occasionally brought indigenous speakers to MIT for linguistics training, so they could help their communities revive their ailing native tongues.
Two years ago, this practice was formalized as the Ken Hale Memorial Master’s Program, in which native speakers (or indigenous people committed to learning their languages) study linguistics, learn the skills necessary to run language programs in their communities, and