Languages

In 1929 the linguist Edward Sapir wrote:

Few people realize that within the confines of the United States there is spoken today a far greater variety of languages ... than in the whole of Europe. We may go further. We may say, quite literally and safely, that in the state of California alone there are greater and more numerous linguistic extremes than can be illustrated in all the length and breadth of Europe. . . . It would be difficult to overestimate the value of [the technical studies documenting these languages] for an eventual philosophy of speech.

Sapir's words celebrate both the diversity of Native American languages and their contribution to the study of one of the most important capacities possessed by human beings: the ability to construct languages. This contribution began to influence linguistic scholarship as early as the sixteenth century. For example, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his Aztec colleagues wrote the twelve-volume encyclopedic work entitled General History of the Things of New Spain (c. 1548) entirely in the Nahuatl language. This and other early recordings of Nahuatl gave us our first extensive written record of a polysynthetic language.

Polysynthetic languages represent one of the important language types in Native America. We can begin to appreciate the linguistic diversity of Native America by comparing the polysynthetic Nahuatl with the more analytic Hopi. Consider the following example. In Nahuatl, the idea "I ate meat" can be rendered in a single word, oninacaqua. In Hopi, this would be rendered nu' sikwit nöösa. It is the characteristic of polysynthetic languages that an entire sentence can be rendered as a single word. A more analytic language, like Hopi, will express the parts of a sentence as separate words. Hopi is more like English than Nahuatl in this respect. Interestingly, however, Hopi belongs to the same language family as Nahuatl, and both are unrelated to English.

Let us look at the two sentences more closely, starting with the Hopi. Hopi is a verb-final language, so the order of words in this sentence conforms to the formula subject = object = verb. This is often abbreviated by linguists as "SOV," so we say, for example, that Hopi is an SOV language. In this feature it contrasts with English, which is an SVO language.

Now let us consider the Nahuatl sentence, which appears here in the same orthography as was used for sixteenth-century manuscripts. A more nearly phonetic rendering would be ooninakakwah, where the oo represents a long o, like the sound of oe in English toe. In order to understand the structure of this Nahuatl "word-sentence" we must break it down into its parts—or morphemes, as they are called in linguistic jargon. Thus we have oo-ni-naka-kwa-h. These five elements can be glossed in English as "past-I-meat-eat-perfect." Notice that -naka-, "meat," the object of the verb, is "incorporated" into the verb. The verb itself is represented by the stem -kwa-, "eat." The first-person subject pronoun -ni-, "I," is also incorporated into the verb, just before the object. (The subject pronoun of Nahuatl is actually related to the independent subject pronoun of Hopi; for example, Nahuatl -ni- corresponds to Hopi nu'.) In both Hopi and Nahuatl, the past tense of the verb is expressed within the verb itself. In Hopi, this is done by using the simple form of the verb, without any affix. In Nahuatl, the past tense is marked by the past-tense prefix oo- together with the suffix -h, which is here glossed as "perfect," indicating that the action denoted by the verb is complete or "perfected."

Polysynthesis and incorporation, both of which are illustrated by the Nahuatl example here, are best known to linguistic scholarship from the languages of the Americas, and continue to be an important topic of linguistic investigation throughout the world to this day. The late Edward Dozier, for example, a Tewa linguist, conducted an extensive study of incorporation in his Santa Clara dialect of Tewa, demonstrating the richness and expressive potential of incorporation in that language. There are many other examples of such scholarship.

The grammatical device known as switch reference was first extensively studied in the languages of North America. Switch references can, for example, be found in Hopi. Consider the following pair of sentences:

Pam pakit pu' pam qatuptu. (He came in and he sat down.)

Pam pakiq pu' pam qatuptu. (He came in and he sat down.)

The English translation of these sentences is ambiguous. We don't know whether the second he refers to the same person as the first he. In Hopi, however, the situation is perfectly clear because of the switch-reference system. Though the word pam means "he" in both cases, we can tell from the form of the first verb whether each occurrence of pam refers to the same person or to a different person. The verb paki bears the suffix -t when the individuals are the same, but when they are different the switch-reference suffix -q is used. Switch reference is a topic of great interest in linguistic scholarship today. Although it was first described in Native American languages, it has also been found in native languages of the South Pacific, such as those spoken in New Guinea and Australia.

One of the most intriguing phenomena in Native American languages, and one perhaps most closely linked to the conceptual world, is the grammatical feature known as the "animacy hierarchy" or the "great chain of being." It can be illustrated with the following example from Navajo:

Ashkii tl'ízí yizloh. (The boy roped the goat.)

This sentence is organized in the SOV order, like the Hopi sentences cited earlier: subject (ashkii, "boy"), object (tl'ízí, "goat"), verb (yizloh "he roped it"). The effect of the animacy hierarchy can be observed when we try to say, "The goat butted the boy." We cannot use the SOV order in this case. Instead, we must use the order OSV, with a special form of the verb (in place of the prefix yi- we must use bi-):

Ashkii tl'ízí bizgoh. (The goat butted the boy.)

The point is this: the boy ranks higher in the hierarchy than the goat, so the sentence has to be constructed so as to have the word for "boy" precede that for "goat," even though the boy is the object and the goat is the subject. In general, in a transitive sentence with subject and object expressed as nominals (nouns or noun phrases), a higher-ranking nominal must precede a lower-ranking one. The hierarchy places humans higher than animals, and animals higher than things.

The hierarchy principle in Navajo grammar provides a window into an aspect of the worldview of the speakers of that language. It must be kept in mind, however, that we cannot simply assume that it is possible to "read off" a culture from an aspect of the grammar of that culture's language. In the case of the Navajo animacy hierarchy, however, a careful study by the linguist Gary Witherspoon has linked this aspect of Navajo grammar with the structure of the Navajo philosophy concerning the origin and structure of language and thought. An important component in Witherspoon's study is the data assembled by the Navajo educator Mary Helen Creamer, who discovered a sensitive detailed hierarchy of concepts involving eight levels, with humans in the highest position and abstract concepts in the lowest position. Animals and inanimate entities are distributed among the six intervening levels. In this case, the philosophical system was studied independently of the language; the one was not derived from the other.

By virtue of its diversity and complexity, Native America presented an ideal environment for the continuing development and testing of the comparative method, which had previously been applied primarily to languages of Europe, the Middle East, and India. One of the language families that Edward Sapir helped to define was Uto-Aztecan, to which Hopi and O'odham, as well as Nahuatl, belong. The comparative method makes heavy use of the notion "regular sound correspondence," as illustrated in the accompanying table.

Hopi	O'odham	Navajo	gloss
qöya	kokda	-hé	kill
qatu	ka:c	-dá	sit/be
kiihu	ki:	kin	house
kuuki	ke'e	-hash	bite
naqvu	na:k	-jaa'	ear
maqa	ma:k	-aa ni-'aah	give
lööyöm	go:k	naaki	two
laaki	gakï	-gan	dry
wihu	gi:gï	-k'ah	fat
wu:ko	ge'e	-tsaaz	big

One can see from the table, Hopi and O'odham display a relationship of regular sound correspondences, which leads scholars to believe that those two languages belong to the same family. By contrast, Navajo has no regular sound correspondences with either language, and we therefore classify it as belonging to another language family. True, there are some accidental correspondences, as in the words for "house" and "dry," but these are not systematic—that is, they do not occur regularly. In fact, Navajo does belong to a different language family, Athabaskan.

The details of comparative linguistics involve not only noticing correspondences but also working out the details of the correspondences—that is, the "rules" for when one thing corresponds to another. For example, the O'odham g sometimes corresponds to Hopi l and sometimes to Hopi w. The rule is this: where there is a correspondence and O'odham has g, Hopi has l before a and ö, the original "low" vowels of the parent Uto-Aztecan language, and in all other cases has w. Similarly, in correspondences where O'odham has k, Hopi has q before a and ö, and in all other cases has k.

In addition to allowing us to determine details of construction and pronunciation, the comparative method also permits us to "reconstruct" a common ancestor language. When we consider all of the Uto-Aztecan languages together, we can posit that in the ancestor language, the two sounds just discussed were, respectively, w and k. By custom, comparativists precede their reconstructions of linguistic elements with an asterisk. Thus *w is the Uto-Aztecan reconstruction for Hopi l/w and O'odham g, and *k is the reconstruction for Hopi q/k and O'odham k. The vowels that "condition" the appearance of l and q in Hopi are Uto-Aztecan *a and *o, the original "low" vowels of the parent language. By contrast, no such systematic reconstruction can be made for Navajo in relation to Hopi and O'odham.

Most Native American languages belong to a family to which some other languages also belong. For example, Hopi and O'odham, which belong to the Uto-Aztecan family, share that family with Nahuatl, Ute, Paiute, Comanche, Shoshone, Yaqui, Luiseño, and many others. The family is named after the languages at its geographic extremes: Ute in the north and Aztec (Nahuatl) in the south. Navajo, as we have noted, is an Athabaskan language and as such is a member of the same family as the Apache languages of the Southwest and northern languages like Sarsi, Chipewyan, Dogrib, and Koyukon, among others. We do not know exactly how many language families there are in the New World. In North America, there are, according to a conservative estimate, approximately sixty-two language families, which belong to eight larger groupings called phyla. Adding Mexico and Central America brings the number of such families to eighty-four, conservatively. With the addition of South America, the total figure rises to one hundred four. These estimates are based on work that adheres to the requirement that regular repeated sound correspondences be established between languages for those languages to be considered closely related. However, this has not been always possible, because for many of the linguistic families of the Americas, the requisite data are sparse.

Much work has been done and is still being done to discover larger groupings of language families. For example, it was suggested by Sapir that Uto-Aztecan and the Tanoan family are related and form a larger grouping called Aztec-Tanoan. Similarly, Athabaskan is believed to form a larger grouping with Tlingit and Eyak, called Na-Dene. Many other groupings have been suggested as well. On the other hand, some families have only one member and are referred to as isolates, a term used for languages that cannot, as yet, be related to any other, like the famous Basque language of Europe. Examples of Native American isolates are Keresan, Porepecha (Tarascan), and possibly the Timucua language of Florida, now extinct.

The language just mentioned, Timucua, was spoken by as many as 722,000 people in the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century that number was reduced to fewer than 37,000. Today the language is no longer spoken. This was the fate of many languages following the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere. It is a sad fact that the Native American languages that survive today continue to be endangered. The danger was recognized quite early on by Native American scholars, as well as the European scholars who worked with them. A number of these native scholars spent much of their lives documenting their respective linguistic and cultural heritages. Some of these early Native American linguists included Francis La Flesche (Omaha), Tony Tillohash (Southern Paiute), George Sword (Oglala Lakota), Ella Deloria (Yankton Sioux), William Benson (Pomo), Vi Hilbert (Skagit), William Beynon (Tsimshian), Juan Delores (O'odham), Edward P. Dozier (Santa Clara), Archie Phinney (Nez Perce), William Jones (Fox), J. N. B. Hewitt (Tuscarora), Parker McKenzie (Kiowa), George Hunt (Kwakiutl), Cora V. Sylestine (Alabama), James R. Murie (Pawnee), William Morgan (Navajo), and the Abenaki scholars Joseph Laurent, Lorne Masta, and Pial Pol Wzôkihlain.

Though the state of native languages was indeed precarious in the nineteenth century, the situation today is much more serious. Some scholars estimate that, for the world as a whole, more than half of the six thousand languages now spoken will become extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. And at that time, some 80 percent of the languages remaining will be endangered. Scholars say that a language is endangered when it is no longer being spoken by children. This benchmark has alarmed many present-day Native American communities, because many of them have no children who speak the local language. If this state of affairs continues, such languages will become extinct when the adults who now speak it die off. Many scholars, community members, and teachers, both Native American and Euro-American, are working to reverse this trend in a large number of communities. Their work involves, among other things, the establishment of community-based education programs involving Native American languages (immersion programs, bilingual-education programs, and so forth), the organization of training workshops for teachers (for example, the American Indian Language Development Institute), and the production of linguistic materials (orthographies, grammars, dictionaries).

In addition to these more traditional language-maintenance activities, political activism has been an important component of work on behalf of Native American languages. Contemporary Native America in general is heavily involved in the use of legal instruments for the promotion of its inherent rights and for the safeguarding of its cultural and intellectual traditions. Native American language scholars and educators have extended their language-maintenance efforts into the legal arena as part of this general tradition. In 1990, thanks to their efforts and those of sympathetic legislators, the Native American Languages Act passed the U.S. Congress.

In the context of this movement, a number of new traditions have developed around the written form of the languages. Among these is the tradition of using native languages to write poetry. The linguist and poet Ofelia Zepeda, for example, uses O'odham in writing a form of poetry that she has termed cegïtoidag, "thoughts." In contrast to the more literary uses of native languages, a number of linguists have begun to write grammatical and lexicographic essays in the native languages of which they are speakers. Representative of this genre is the work done by Albert Alvarez on O'odham, Gordon Francis on Micmac, Paul Platero on Navajo, the late Josephine White Eagle on Winnebago, Jorge Matamoros on Miskitu, and Florentino Ajpacaja Tum on Quiché Mayan.

Is the outlook for Native American languages positive or negative? The answer to this question must involve a consideration of the human energy and intellectual power being devoted to safeguarding the continent's valuable linguistic traditions. Keeping this in mind, we should recall the words of the California linguist Leanne Hinton, who, when asked in a discussion about those active in the preservation effort whether it was too late to save these languages, declared, "No. How can it be when people like these bend their efforts to saving them?"

Languages

See also Algonquian Languages; Cherokee Language; Cree Language; Iroquoian Languages; Lakota Language; Navajo Language; Ojibwa Language; Pueblo Languages; Salishan Languages.

Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, eds., The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Leanne Hinton, Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1994); Cornelius Osgood, ed., Linguistic Structures of Native America Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 6 (New York: Viking Fund, 1946).

LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne
Hopi
University of Nevada at Reno