by Jeremy Hunt
Daily Lobo
Every two weeks, one of the world's 7,000 languages becomes extinct.
UNM faculty is working to keep American Indian languages alive in New Mexico and trying to establish a center to help preserve them.
"The issue of language maintenance is not just some academic exercise," said Christine Sims, a professor in the language literacy and sociocultural department. "These indigenous languages are spoken nowhere else in the world."
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The American Indian Language Policy Research and Teacher Training Center would give tribes the support they need to preserve their languages, Sims said.
The center will hold workshops and help tribal leaders develop curriculum to fit the needs of their people, she said.
Congress passed legislation with a $200,000 appropriation to fund the center, said Rep. Heather Wilson, who introduced the bill.
"We're losing languages," she said. "With that, we lose culture and who we are."
The legislation is waiting consideration by the Senate, Wilson said.
Sims said there are about 20 indigenous languages still spoken in New Mexico, and they are in danger of extinction.
Of those languages, there are three spoken only by older adults in the communities, including the Mescalero and Jicarilla pueblos, Sims said.
When a language dies, so does the culture and identity of the people who speak it, she said.
"The challenge, for the rest of us, is how do we make sure that doesn't happen?" she said. "These languages can't be revitalized from any one other source except within their community."
The only way to keep the languages alive is to have older generations encourage and teach the youth to speak it, said Melissa Axelrod, a linguistics professor who works with the NambÇ tribe.
"A lot of people think all pueblo languages are the same, but they're completely different," she said. "We have this incredible, exciting diversity in New Mexico."
Axelrod said the University has a responsibility to revitalize indigenous languages, because for a long time, educational institutions discouraged American Indians from speaking their languages.
"They would torture little kids just for speaking their language," she said. "That was educational policy in this country for many years."
Sometimes, American Indians discourage their children from learning their native languages, said Roseann Willink, a linguistics professor in the Navajo program.
"Some parents are against teaching their kids because they had a hard time growing up speaking a native language," she said. "The young people are the ones that don't really care about it or don't really have any use for the native languages."
Younger generations need to realize the value of their native languages, Axelrod said.
Without their languages, they can't understand where they came from or who they are, she said.
"You want to think about your own language," she said. "People in other communities speak (English) differently than others. You look at those differences, and you see something about what binds communities together and how we use language to express our identity."
