Listen & Learn Blog

Mark this on the list of “things I didn’t know”: Full moons have names!

According to a post on Space.com, this tradition dates back a few hundred years, to Native Americans of what is now the northern and eastern United States, who gave names to moons in order to keep track of seasons. The name given to the moon was applied to the full month in which it appeared. European settlers followed this custom, and also created their own names.

Here are the names and times for the next couple of months:

May 5, 11:35 p.m. EDT – Full Flower Moon.  Flowers are abundant everywhere at this time. May’s full moon was also known as the Full Corn Planting Moon or the Milk Moon. The moon will also be at perigee just 25 minutes after turning full, at 12:00 a.m. EDT on May 6, at a distance of 221,801 miles (356,955 kilometers) from Earth. Very high ocean tides can be expected from the coincidence of perigee with the full moon.

Jun. 4, 7:12 a.m. EDT – Full Strawberry Moon.  Known to every Algonquin tribe, Europeans called it the Rose Moon. A partial eclipse of the moon will be visible chiefly favoring those living around the Pacific Rim. Observers in Japan and Australia for instance, can see it at, or soon after, moonrise, while those in the western United States and western Canada see it at, or just before, moonset.  At maximum, about 37 percent of the moon’s diameter will be immersed in the dark umbra shadow of the Earth.

What would you name the moon for the month of your birth?

Full moon image from netlancer2006 under the Flickr Creative Commons Licence.

A fascinating article in the New York Times takes a look at Guaraní, an indigenous language of Paraguay that is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population.

We often hear of indigenous languages dying out because of lack of speakers, but Guaraní is different. It’s been supported by governments throughout history, including dictators who have used speakers as informants. Under General Stroessner, who ruled from 1954 to 1989, the language thrived – the General made it an official language and rewarded rural speakers with land for their loyalty.

It’s not just dictators who have supported the language though. When democratic rule was established in Paraguay, the language was furthered strengthened when it was made equal to Spanish. Now there is debate in the country about its future.

You can learn more about Guaraní over at Omniglot.

A new hub for endangered languages has been set up on the Internet.

Described as an “ark”, the site features eight “talking dictionaries” featuring dying languages from around the world. The dictionaries feature photos of cultural objects, written words and audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences in their language. Some languages are being written down for the first time.

Alfred “Bud” Lane, one of the last fluent speakers of a Native American language called Siletz Dee-in from Oregon, said: “The talking dictionary is and will be one of the best resources we have in our struggle to keep Siletz alive.”

Other dictionaries feature Matukar Panau, an Oceanic language from Papua New Guinea which has only 600 speakers. Before the Enduring Voices team began studying it three years ago, the language had never been recorded or written. The Matukar Panau dictionary contains 3045 entries, 3035 audio files, and 67 images.

Even though they had never experienced the internet, the Matukar Panau community asked for their language to be placed on the web. They finally saw and heard their language online when computers arrived in their village last year. (Source: National Geographic)

Other dictionaries are now in production, including a ninth for Celtic tongues.

In what seems like good news for Native American languages, the US Census Bureau has reported that 169,000 people speak Navajo.

That figure makes it the Native American language that’s most spoken in homes, but should be treated with caution. For a start, the survey didn’t measure fluency levels – it just asked if a language other than English was spoken in the home.

Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country’s population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the language, one doesn’t — and those are likely younger Navajos, Yazzie said.

“Navajo has the largest population, they say, of Native speakers, but it also has the largest population of non-speakers,” she said Wednesday. “And it kind of presents a skewed picture.”

The figure is based on five-year estimates from community surveys that allowed the Census for the first time to study small segments of the U.S. population. The Census found in a study released this month that fewer than a half-million people age 5 and over speak a Native American language at home. About 65 percent of them are in nine counties in Arizona, New Mexico and Alaska. (Source: ABC News)

A few months ago, I posted about Indigenous Tweets, a site that tracks 82 languages.

The site recently celebrated turning six months old with the launch of a new service tracking blogs written in indigenous languages. Currently it only tracks blog posts on Blogger but plans are afoot to also track other popular blog services.

A great feature is being able to follow a bundle of blogs using an RSS reader like Google Reader. This means that you can follow all blogs for a particular language without having to subscribe to them individually. You can also subscribe to individual blog feeds if you feel the bundles are too much.

This is a fantastic resource for finding new material in your target language and also hopefully a subject you’re interested in. Why not try commenting on blog posts in your target language?

Hawaii is the newest of the 50 states; one of only two that do not observe daylight savings time; and has a rich history pre-European contact.

It has two official languages: English and Hawaiian. Hawaiian Creole English (or pidgin) is used by many residents of the state, either as a native or second language. The Hawaiian language experienced a resurgence since the late 20^th Century, with immersion schools and a campus of the University of Hawaii teaching in the language. However according to Keola Donaghy in an interview with Indigenous Tweets, the number of speakers has now reached a plateau of around 10,000 people.

Donaghy is a non-native speaker but has done a lot of work to promote the language, including working on the Google search interface in Hawaiian. He has a vision that people will be able to use technology in Hawaiian. Read the rest of his interview, and view links to Hawaiian language resources here.

Have you, like me, never used Twitter? This news could tempt us – a computer science professor has set up a website to track tweets from speakers of indigenous and minority languages.

Called IndigenousTweets.com, the site currently tracks 82 languages including Cymraeg, Māori and Wolof. There are plans to add more, and some may come from the input box that allows users to add the Twitter names of other people they know who are tweeting in their native language.

Kevin Scannell, the professor behind the site, also blogs about the project. Scannell is starting to post interviews with speakers of indigenous and minority languages who are involved in language revitalization efforts and who use their languages online which should also be really interesting.

So, what are you waiting for? Get tweeting and connecting with people in your target language!

(Source: Storify)

In the news recently was the story of the two remaining speakers of Ayapaneco, who do not talk to each other.

A little closer to home the remaining speaker of Nuchatlaht, an indigenous language of Canada, remains enthusiastic about speaking the language. Alban Michael is 84 years old and has been speaking Nuchatlaht since he was a child – it was his mother’s only language. Living in a remote part of north Vancouver Island, there is little opportunity for Mr Michael to speak his native language, although a friend from a nearby Mowachaht band has a dialect that is close enough for them to be able to converse.

Work is being done to preserve these native languages, including an immersion programme that teams an ‘apprentice’ with a fluent speaker – this seems to be getting results.

According to the article in the Victoria Times Colonist:

The roughly 30,000 aboriginal people of Vancouver Island mostly came from two linguistic families, Wakashan and Salishan, further divided into six languages (there is argument over that number, since it’s not always clear where a dialect ends and a language begins).

Some overlap in the manner of Swedish and Norwegian, while some have been described as different as Russian and Congolese.

Only a few hundred of those 30,000 natives still speak the old languages fluently. The First Peoples’ Council gave this snapshot:

- A total of 115 people are fluent in the dozen dialects (including Alban’s Nuchatlaht) of Nuu-chah-nulth on the north and west Island.
- Just a dozen speakers of Ditidaht (also known as Nitinat) remain.
- Kwak’wala, the language of the Kwakwaka’wakw, who live along the inner coast and islands north of the Comox Valley, has 148 fluent speakers.
- The Salishan languages are found from Sooke, through Victoria and Duncan and up to the Comox Valley: ? Thirty remain fluent in Comox-Sliammon.
- 278 are comfortable in the dialects of Hul’q'umi’num’, found from Cowichan Bay to Nanoose.
- About 60 speak the Sencoten language of the Saanich Peninsula. The associated tongues of T’souke, Lekwungen, Semiahmoo, which were spoken from Sooke through Victoria are listed as “sleeping.”

In good news for Native American languages, Google has made Cherokee a “searchable” language.

Although Google won’t translate Cherokee websites into English or English websites into Cherokee, content written in Cherokee can now be found using the search engine. An on-screen keyboard will allow characters to be typed in the Cherokee alphabet, known as the “syllabary”. The development comes after Google spent over a year working with translators from the Cherokee Nation.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chad Smith hailed it as a major victory in the tribe’s battle to preserve its ancient language.

“Language is like a muscle. It has to be exercised in order to stay healthy and grow stronger,” Smith told the Tulsa World.
“This is one more tool for people, especially young people, to exercise their language.”

“No one really knows how much content is out there because it’s never been searchable before,” he said.

“This will make what is already there more accessible, and at the same time, it will be an incentive to create more Cherokee content.” (Source: Tulsa World)

Students at some universities are foregoing traditional languages in favour of learning indigenous languages, according to the LA Times.

Rather than taking French, Spanish or Mandarin, the students are learning indigenous Latin American languages such as Zapotec, Quechua and Mixtec. Their reasons for taking the classes are varied – some want to work with the people who speak the language, others to get closer to their roots.

In Los Angeles, Felipe Lopez also gradually shed his shame for Zapotec.

Many of the estimated 300,000 Oaxacans living in Los Angeles County are of Zapotec decent, he said. He wanted the language and the culture recognized as distinct, even in a sea of Spanish-speaking Mexicans.

Lopez now represents his countrymen living in the United States by serving as a liaison to the Oaxacan government. And he and two UCLA colleagues worked for eight years in the 1990s to write the first Zapotec, Spanish, English dictionary. The thick book defines 9,000 words in Zapotec, a language that is hardly ever written.

With the many stories in the news about endangered indigenous languages, this shows that there is still enthusiasm and reason for learning and keeping at-risk languages alive.