Listen & Learn Blog

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.

A new language has been discovered in a remote part of India.

The language, Koro, was discovered by a team of linguists who were on an expedition as part of National Geographic’s “Enduring Voices” project on threatened indigenous languages.

It is estimated that the language is spoken by around 800 to 1200 people and has never been written down. Koro is distinct from other languages in the area, and belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family. According to BBC News:

The researchers were searching for two other little-known languages spoken only in one small area.
As they heard and recorded these, they found a third which was completely new to them and had never before been listed.

“We didn’t have to get far on our word list to realise it was extremely different in every possible way,” said Dr David Harrison, one of the expedition leaders.

The linguists recorded thousands of words- and found Koro was distinct from other languages in the area.
It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family, which includes around 150 languages spoken in India. But scientists were unable to find any others closely related to Koro within this group.

I find it amazing that this language wasn’t ‘discovered’ until now! I wonder how many other languages we haven’t yet heard about?

A linguist from Cambridge University, England, is headed to north-west Greenland to document Inughuit culture and language.

Stephen Pax Leonard will live with the Inughuit people for a year, producing an “ethnography of speaking” to show how their language and culture are interconnected. Their Inuktun dialect is regarded as one of the most “pure” Inuit dialects. The lifestyle of the Inughuit is threatened by climate change, with seal numbers dropping and the ice becoming too thin to use dog sleds.

Leonard’s interest in the Inughuits began 10 years ago when he read Marie Herbert’s book The Snow People, an account of life with the Inughuits, but it is only recently that he learned how imminent the threat is to their way of life and their culture.

“I just hadn’t realised how endangered the community was and this whole culture could simply die, disappear. Normally languages die out because it is parents deciding they don’t want their children to speak it.”

Leonard, who is 36, will have to adapt to many things, not least the extreme temperatures. Although the average temperature is-25C, it can plummet to -40 or soar to zero in the summer. Then there is the arctic darkness, with the sun expected to go down on 24 October and not rise again until 8 March. It is this time of year that elders talk and pass on their stories and poetry. (Source: The Guardian)

It’s great to hear of someone trying to make a real difference to a language, by documenting it and giving it back to the people it belongs to – the Inughuit. Read the full article here.

After yesterday’s post on New York’s linguistic diversity, I was pointed to a follow-up post on the New York Times’ City Room blog. This post wondered what the least-spoken languages are in New York.

As they point out, no data is available for the city itself, but the census’ American Community Survey has statewide figures for the question “what languages other than English do you speak at home?” These were the least common answers:

1. Cayuga: 6 speakers.
2. Eskimo languages: 7.
3. Delaware: 9.
4. Iroquois: 10.
5. Kusaiean (spoken on Kosrae Island, Micronesia): 10.
6. Mohave: 13.
7. Algonquin: 13.
8. Kachin (spoken in northeast Myanmar) : 22.
9. Pangasinan (spoken in northwest Philippines): 22.
10. Pidgin: 22.
11. Zuni: 24.
12. Kazakh: 26.
13. Faroese (spoken on the Faroe islands off Denmark): 27.
14. Inupik (an Eskimo language): 29.
15. Cajun: 31.
16. Achinese (spoken in Aceh, western Sumatra): 32.
17. Mayan: 35.
18. Tungus (spoken in Siberia and northeastern China): 36.
19. Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in parts of Switzerland): 39.
20. Ponapean (spoken on Pohnpei Island, Micronesia): 40.
21. Muskogee: 40.

It’s interesting that Native American languages such as Iroquois and Algonquin are just as scarce as Kusaiean, a language spoken in Micronesia, a place most people would struggle to point out on a map (it’s north of Papua New Guinea and east of the Philippines, if you’re looking). And they are more scarce than Pangasinan, spoken in the northwest Philippines, and Kazakh, possibly only recognisable from the fictional character (and movie) Borat.

Should there be more of a focus on indigenous languages in America?