3 February 2010
In general I’m skeptical about the ability to resuscitate or revive dead languages, but this is an interesting case. NPR reports on the efforts of the Chitimacha tribe in southern Louisiana to revive their language—the last native speaker of which died in 1940. There are about 1,000 Chitamacha tribe members, which is a small, but not impossibly small, group in which to keep a language alive.
It’s not clear from the story how many members of the tribe speak Chitimacha as a second language, or their degree of fluency. This would seem to me to be the most critical element in the prospects for the language’s revival. Evidently the language is pretty well documented—including sound recordings from the 1930s—so this is not a case where we are about to lose all academic knowledge of the language. And the software company that makes Rosetta Stone translation products is doing a lot of pro bono work, funding it and providing the preservation and instructional technology—a great example of good corporate citizenship.
The NPR piece also calls Chitamacha a sleeping language, a term that I hadn’t heard before. It sounds better, at least, than dead language.
(Hat tip to the Lousy Linguist)
