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LEARNING AND TEACHING ENDANGERED INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES

INTRODUCTION

Most of the languages of the world are spoken by small numbers of people. Nettle and Romaine (2000), calculating from data on the Ethnologue, state that 90% of the languages of the world are spoken by only 10% of the people respectively. These are usually indigenous and minority languages in nations that do not support them, and over the last several hundred years their speakers have been under increasing pressure from the forces of industrialization and globalization to shift to a majority language. Typically, education, jobs, mass media, and literary materials are in the majority language, making it difficult for anyone who does not command the majority language to thrive. And in learning the majority language, the minority language is often abandoned. Thus we have a worldful of endangered languages— languages going out of use, no longer being learned at home by children, languages that seem to be disappearing from the face of the earth. However, the small languages of the world still have great value to their speakers and to the descendents of speakers. The language may symbolize and even embody traditional values, religion and culture, rich oral literature, history, and a sense of rooted identity (Fishman, 1985). The wish for partial or full autonomy of indigenous groups trapped in a nation established by conquest or colonization also adds to the symbolic value of the languages. Therefore in much of the world we see the decline of indigenous minority languages accompanied by the counterforce of grass roots attempts to reverse language shift through the education of children and adults who have not learned their language at home. These efforts are followed with interest and support by many people outside the indigenous communities as well, since there is a growing sense that language diversity, and the knowledge systems that accompany the languages, are important to posterity in general. These languages are the carriers of unique environmental understanding, philosophies, and great oral literatures whose loss should be mourned by all. Thus the survival and revitalization of indigenous languages is supported by occasional reports in the press, by linguists lending their expertise, by foundations interested in indigenous welfare, and sometimes even by governments willing to shift N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 157–167. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.

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LEANNE HINTON

away from the older language eradication policies to support indigenous language survival. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S

The USA is one of the countries where indigenous languages are the most deeply endangered. According to the Ethnologue (Gordon, 2005), there are 72 American Indian languages known to be extinct. Of 146 living American Indian languages, 67 have only a handful of elderly speakers; and only 20 languages have a sizable number of fam