{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-tsx","path":"/primelanguagepreservation","result":{"data":{"primeArticle":{"slug":"prime.languagepreservation","excerpt":"Thousands of languages across the world face extinction. UCLA linguists and native speakers alike are working to preserve them, pushing the field to evolve..","headline":"Before They Disappear","author":"Jacqueline Jacobo","authorbio":"","authoremail":"","authortwitter":"","coverimg":"https://assets3.dailybruin.com/images/prime.languagepreservation/langpres.jpg","covercred":"Isabel Rubin-Saika","coveralt":"Illustration of three bookshelves on a wall.","articleType":"article","updated":"The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Luz Maria De La Torre has taught Quechua at UCLA since winter 2019. In fact, she has taught Quechua at UCLA since winter 2009.","content":[{"type":"text","value":"Luz Maria De la Torre is leading her students through a hike near UCLA. She stops along the trail, pointing to a flower and giving its name in Quechua – a language vulnerable to extinction."},{"type":"text","value":"De la Torre, a continuing lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Latin American Institute, has taught Quechua on campus since winter 2009. She not only details its grammatical characteristics, but also integrates content on indigenous culture, knowledge and spirituality in order to teach students respect for the language and the South American cultures it originates from."},{"type":"text","value":"When De la Torre was young, she did not have similar opportunities. This class comes decades after a childhood spent in Ecuadorian classrooms, where her teachers chastised the use of Quechua – the only language passed down to her by her parents. Instead, they told her to \"speak Christian.\""},{"type":"text","value":"\"It was very difficult to acquire the language, to acquire the knowledge,\" De la Torre said. \"But we survived.\""},{"type":"text","value":"Quechua is just one of over 3,000 other languages vulnerable to extinction across the globe. Despite a lack of funding toward research and preservation, UCLA experts are committed to keeping these languages alive. However, experts worry about the extractive and objectifying nature of linguistics itself, making the path to preservation uncertain for many languages."},{"type":"text","value":"According to UNESCO, an international agency that funds projects to preserve and promote cultural heritage, a language becomes endangered when it is in critical risk of losing all of its speakers. Paul Kroskrity, a distinguished professor of anthropology and American Indian studies, said 90% of the world’s languages could be lost within this century."},{"type":"pull","value":"{\"caption\":\"It was very difficult to acquire the language, to acquire the knowledge,\\\" De la Torre said. \\\"But we survived.\\\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"\"The only languages that survive are those languages that are closely identified as the language of a nation state,\" Kroskrity said."},{"type":"text","value":"In many cases, a language becomes endangered when it competes with a more widely-spoken one. In the American southwest, Native American Tewa people speak Tewa as their native language. Kroskrity said part of the reason their language is nearing extinction is because of media saturation – English dominates their radios and television, relegating Tewa to primarily cultural celebrations."},{"type":"text","value":"Although a language’s lack of use can signal its endangered status, Pamela Munro, a distinguished research professor of linguistics, said that widely-spoken languages such as Yiddish can also be at risk – most Yiddish speakers are elderly and their language is not being passed on to their grandchildren."},{"type":"text","value":"\"Even the language that has millions of speakers can be endangered,\" Munro said. \"The thing that makes a language endangered is that it is losing speakers faster than it is gaining speakers.\""},{"type":"text","value":"One of the driving forces that places languages into these vulnerable states is a community’s forced assimilation into another culture, Kroskrity said."},{"type":"text","value":"U.S. boarding schools for Native American children were one such tool for assimilation, Kroskrity said. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, U.S. boarding schools punished Native American children for expressing their indigenous culture, forcing them to assimilate into white mainstream culture during the 19th and 20th centuries. Survivors reported being stripped away from their families and suffering assault and emotional trauma."},{"type":"text","value":"Kroskrity said these boarding schools specifically barred the usage of indigenous languages in classrooms, forcing their education to revolve around English."},{"type":"text","value":"\"This created a real disruption in the ability to learn the language,\" Kroskrity said. \"A lot of people, a lot of communities, trace the kind of rupture between generations to the boarding schools.\""},{"type":"text","value":"The impacts of language bans do not end when they are lifted, according to Ben Eischens, an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics. He added that within indigenous American communities, these bans have not only led to the stigmatization of their languages, but also of indigenous identities themselves."},{"type":"pull","value":"{\"caption\":\"The thing that makes a language endangered is that it is losing speakers faster than it is gaining speakers.\\\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"This type of social stigma extends across continents. Hanbeom Jung, a graduate student in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, is one of only 10,000 or fewer native Jejueo speakers left in the world. Jejueo is primarily spoken 53 miles south of the Korean peninsula on its namesake island Jeju. The 2020 census counted less than 700,000 residents."},{"type":"text","value":"Jung said families living on Jeju Island often feel as though speaking Korean will better prepare their children for academic success in mainland South Korea."},{"type":"text","value":"\"Parents in Jeju Island, they don’t want their kids to learn or speak Jejueo,\" Jung said."},{"type":"text","value":"In the same way that assimilation has driven the endangerment of certain languages, it has also created some of the barriers linguists and native speakers face when raising awareness on language preservation. Jung said a need to conform to the Korean language has caused misunderstandings of Jejueo and a general disinterest in learning about it. He added that some people believe Jejueo is just a dialect of Korean, rather than its own language."},{"type":"text","value":"\"Not many people pay attention to preserving or revitalizing the language, which makes me so sad,\" Jung said. \"Elevating the attention of people would be another hardship we’d (preservationists) have to overcome.\""},{"type":"text","value":"Linguists also face a lack of funding for endangered language research, Kroskrity said. He added that only around $2 million is available annually for research into Native American language preservation, despite there being over 540 tribes. This value is far less than the $2.81 billion (updated due to inflation) the U.S. spent on boarding schools from 1877 to 1918 in order to conform indigenous people into mainstream white culture and eradicate their languages."},{"type":"text","value":"\"In order to research, study, documentate, preserve or revitalize the language, it requires a lot of efforts... what is sad is that there are not many chances to get funded for our projects,\" Jung said."},{"type":"text","value":"Despite the obstacles faced by native speakers of endangered languages and researchers alike, efforts to revitalize these tongues have continued at UCLA through courses in endangered languages, including Quechua, Nahuatl, Basque and Catalan."},{"type":"text","value":"In other departments, upper-division anthropology courses have also been able to bring language revitalization into the undergraduate classroom. For instance, Kroskrity taught Anthropology M156: Language Endangerment and Linguistic Revitalization, which is cross-listed in the department of American Indian Studies. He said the class focuses on case studies of endangered languages and language revitalizations, all while highlighting the importance of linguistic diversity."},{"type":"text","value":"\"In the average class of 60, I’ll have 10 or 15 people who are heritage speakers who really want this knowledge because they’re gonna take it back to their language, to their community,\" Kroskrity said."},{"type":"text","value":"Besides educating students in a traditional classroom format, UCLA researchers have been able to publish dictionaries in various endangered languages. Munro co-wrote a dictionary in the indigenous language of Chickasaw, a tongue with less than 75 speakers, which is currently being taught in Chickasaw language programs in Oklahoma."},{"type":"text","value":"She has also published a dictionary in Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal and Gambia, and has been updating a Tongva dictionary and grammar book to teach indigenous Tongva people interested in learning their language."},{"type":"text","value":"\"It’s (Tongva) a language that has not been spoken since... at the latest the 1940s, so there are no native speakers of this language who are still alive,\" Munro said. \"All that we know about this language is from written documentation.\""},{"type":"pull","value":"{\"caption\":\"You can go sit and ask somebody to translate sentences for you... if that’s where you end your interaction with people, all you’ve done is take.\\\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"In the spring of 2024, UCLA National Heritage Language Resource Center hosted the International Symposium on Research and Teaching of Endangered and Marginalized Languages in East and Southeast Asia, a conference that brought together scholars from universities across Asia and Hawaii to discuss their communities’ endangered languages. Jung, who attended the symposium, said because so few people are interested in endangered languages – and even less study them – he found it to be inspiring."},{"type":"text","value":"\"Our focus languages were different, but we felt solidarity,\" Jung said."},{"type":"text","value":"UCLA Library also hosts the Modern Endangered Archives Program, which strives to preserve and digitize endangered cultural materials from recent centuries. The program’s website showcases audio of musical performances and stories in languages like Nahautl and Idoma, which have been classified as ‘potentially vulnerable’ by UNESCO."},{"type":"text","value":"However, despite these efforts, UCLA linguists say the field of linguistics and its relationship to speakers of indigenous and endangered languages has historically been an extractive one. Corrina Fuller, a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics, said academia can often encourage linguists to find a language and catalog its verbs and syntax, separating these findings from the culture they come from. She said this objectifies both the language and the people who speak it."},{"type":"text","value":"\"You can go sit and ask somebody to translate sentences for you... if that’s where you end your interaction with people, all you’ve done is take,\" Fuller said."},{"type":"text","value":"Similarly, Munro and Eischens said linguists and their research are often disengaged from the needs of endangered language speakers. Eischens said linguists will often enter a community, learn from it and publish their findings without speakers of that community’s language ever benefitting from the time they spent being studied."},{"type":"text","value":"De La Torre said this separation from a language’s culture can make it difficult to authentically teach and preserve a language in a classroom setting."},{"type":"text","value":"\"The transmission of language in our community is very different because we... teach each other in our daily life – cooking, dancing, planting, harvesting – so in every single moment,\" De la Torre said. \"But we cannot reproduce the same system in the academic space.\""},{"type":"text","value":"According to Eischens, the history of oppression many indigenous communities have faced, along with the objectifying nature of some linguistic research, has also caused there to be a distrust between researchers and members of some endangered language communities. When one of Eischens’s colleagues was explaining his preservation work to an endangered language speaker, they were skeptical because speaking their tongue had previously led to discrimination."},{"type":"text","value":"\"It’s very hard to take a sharp turn from hundreds of years of devaluing and stigmatization to all of a sudden being like, ‘Oh yeah, these people think my language is pretty cool and I should study it,’\" Eischens said."},{"type":"text","value":"Although these ethical and logistical conflicts present challenges towards language preservation, researchers and linguists like Jung are committed to continue finding sensible research methods across different disciplines, like sociology or anthropology, in order to keep endangered tongues alive."},{"type":"text","value":"As a graduate student, Jung is focused on researching Jejueo’s pragmatics – how its linguistic expressions are used in everyday conversations – to preserve his own native language before it is too late. In the future, Jung said he hopes other preservationists make an emphasized point to converse with native speakers, their communities and their interests."},{"type":"text","value":"Since starting at UCLA, Jung said he has been surrounded by linguists who care about preservation as much as he does. He feels grateful for this community – and it has made him feel recognized."},{"type":"text","value":"\"I’m so proud of myself being able to speak one of the endangered languages, and I feel so strong sense of duty to preserve and revitalize the language,\" Jung said. \"I personally think this is my lifelong call.\""}]}},"pageContext":{"term":"summer24","slug":"prime.languagepreservation"}},"staticQueryHashes":[]}