Furthermore, minority status itself can have an influence on a language’s syntax and vocabulary, which is a point of interest for many linguists. “If you’re in a small community where everybody knows everybody, I don’t have to refer to things by name—I can refer to he, she, or it,” Polinsky says. “You find that sometimes simple things…are expressed very differently because of the tight-knit culture.”
Polinsky’s point is borne out by the experiences of Kenard G. Dillon ’17, who grew up on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. His grandfather was a World War II Navajo code talker, and though his parents do not know the language, he took it up during his primary education. He found that Navajo's geographic isolation meant that it lacked the vocabulary to describe the new ideas and technologies brought by globalization. “Because [Navajo] were all so confined to this one little corner of the southwest, we didn’t know what an ocean was, or what a whale was,” he says. Instead of wholesale borrowing of words from English to describe these new things, Navajo instead uses metaphors that reimagine everyday objects. “The word for octopus is ‘eight-arms,’ and a whale is just ‘big fish,’” Dillon says. “The word for metal is ‘besh,’ so technology is just ‘besh so-and-so’—phone is ‘metal that talks’ and a computer is ‘metal that thinks.’”
When a language dies, linguists say, it diminishes the potential for these kinds of insights, whether linguistic or cultural. “For a linguist, you lose a particular system that’s as complex as the next one,” Polinsky says. “And all that ambient culture that language creates will also get lost.”
TRANSMISSION FAILURE
Despite their precarious political position, many endangered languages are being preserved and even revived thanks to both their continual study by outside researchers and successful activism by native speakers.
Welsh is somewhat of a poster child for successful language revitalization. It’s currently spoken by about 20 percent of the population of Wales. While still a relatively small proportion, the modest growth experienced in the 21st century represents the halt of a long decline, with the percentage of Welsh speakers in Wales bottoming out in 1991 at 18.7 percent according to census data. The days of the Welsh not are over, and the Welsh language is a strong source of pride for its speakers.
But the survival of a language cannot be taken for granted—education and language transference must continue to occur if a language has any hope of survival. “One of the most effective ways of killing a language is to stop transmitting it to children,” Polinsky says.
This lack of transmission was an issue for Navajo—in the mid-1900s, students like Dillon's grandparents were discouraged from both speaking their native tongue in school and passing it on to their future children. “My grandparents on my mom’s side both went to boarding school,” Dillon says. “Boarding school meant to Americanize Native Americans—the way the language was approached was, ‘You need to speak English, and when you start families, you’re not going to teach your kids this language, because this language isn’t American.’”
However, the use of Navajo code-talkers in World War II—considered integral to the Allies’ success—renewed interest in teaching and speaking the language. Even so, Dillon’s mother, like many in her generation, does not speak any Navajo at all. It’s standard for students on the Navajo reservation to take classes in the language, but Dillon says its teaching is hampered by inconsistent curricula as well as what he describes as Arizona’s fiercely conservative political environment.
“The law says that we can’t instruct students in any language other than English,” Dillon says. “So to get past that, tribes have to classify their own languages as foreign languages so that they’re able to teach it legally.”
At the end of our interview, Dillon introduces himself to me once again, this time in Navajo. As he speaks, my Anglophone ears pick up the breathiness of French, the musicality of Mandarin, and the cadence of Arabic—but the content of what he says is uniquely Navajo.
“I said my name, and then I mentioned my clans—which really defines who you are,” Dillon says. “I mentioned my mom’s clan, my dad’s clan, my maternal grandfather’s clan, and my paternal grandfather’s clan.”
This is the standard Navajo introduction, according to Dillon, akin to the way you’d introduce yourself in English to an audience or a formal group. Dillon’s introduction illustrates the particular importance of family and history to the Navajo people. For Dillon and other speakers of minority languages, their native tongues are just as much a part of this history as the words they speak.
—Staff writer Matthew J. Watson can be reached at matthew.watson@thecrimson.com.