Tshephisho,

I would talk with Julian Granberry, anthropologist and linguist in Florida. He is getting up in age, but I think he is still active. He has met with and studied several southeastern U.S. Native American tribes and helped revive their ancient languages, including the Chitimacha and the Tunica-Biloxi people. He also successfully got the Rosetta Stone language learning company to produce learning DVDs for those languages so that the tribes could use them to teach their young going forward. If I remember correctly, the Rosetta Stone people require a certain number of DVDs to be purchased in order to agree to create them. I believe he was able to get commitments from the tribe and certain national and world-wide libraries to buy the DVDs in order to accomplish the task. He should have some very good suggestions for you.

JAG

The suggestions by James A Green ·and Shahzaman Haque·mix individual initiative and expertise with public policies.

The former provides the know-how while the latter supplies the funding and messaging.

In Africa local experts and activists are available. However, authorities do not seem to give high priority to  culture and language. Yet, such resources are the prerequisites for genuine development.

The absolutely best and least expensive way to preserve and expand an endangered language is to have young children live with their grandparents (or bring grandparents to live with them) so that they learn to use the language automatically in the most natural way. This does not require any effort by specialists or any institutional funding, nor any technology. This is the way all languages have been learned for tens of thousands of years. But when people perceive that their language has no value, or negative value, their attitudes will lead to the rapid extinction of the language. If their language is to be perpetuated, the community must be convinced -- and given solid reasons -- for valorizng their language, or there is no hope for its future. This where development specialists could have some reasonable impact through government policies.

Rudy Troike writes: « But when people perceive that their language has no value, or negative value, their attitudes will lead to the rapid extinction of the language. »



True. However, the devaluation of a language or a culture is usually induced and sustained by public policy. This may take various forms: indifference, negligence, hostility, persecution, warfare, internal displacement.…



Take for instance, the ongoing plight of the Royinghya people in Burma and the flight of thousands of their families across the border into Bangladesh. Also, recently, employees of a timber corporation slaughtered family members in the Amazon forest in Brazil. The victims were members of a tribe that had not had any contact with the industrial world.



The African situation is characterized by the persistence of a two-tiered society, in which an “elite” minority is fluent in the language of the former colonial country ; they can speak, read and write it. But the indigenous languages —irrespective of the number of their speakers— remain mostly oral. Yet, it is well known that literacy facilitates the recording, preservation and development of a language. Literacy campaigns require a lot of resources (human, material, financial) and a long-term commitment. Unfortunately, they are underfunded, politicized and short-lived. It happened in my home country of Guinea, capital-city: Conakry, West Africa.



Actions such as marginalization, strife and violence place a heavy and disruptive burden on the family unit, which constitutes, unquestionably, a vital link in the transmission of cultural heritage, education and language competency. 

While the Native Americans did not have a written language, they often adopted the Roman alphabet to their words. I think one of the things that Julian does is to search for all documents written in an almost dead indigenous language in museums, archives, and family heirlooms. He then gets with elders to figure out what those written words mean, as well as any phonics that they remember from their youth. In this way he reconstructs the language.

In the United States ca. 1920-1950 the government tried very hard to eradicate Native American languages and Louisiana French. Children were forbidden to speak their native tongue in the classroom and punished for doing so. In the Louisiana, that generation often acted as interpreters for their non-English speaking parents and grandparents. When that bilingual generation grew up and had children, their offspring often did not learn the language of their grandparents or only enough to interact with them. The next generation had even less of their native tongue because their parents and grandparents spoke English.

Generally, by the time that it is realized that a language is on the verge of being extinct, there are very few elders remaining with the knowledge.

Dear Sefara,

You do this primarily by using encouraging natives to use the language; and secondarily by studying or encouraging scholars to study the language.

Best

I regret that I have no specifics to offer, but I do have a general recommendation:  Governments and individuals should be made aware that they would not simply be preserving an endangered language, but also a distinct world view and a window into another culture.  Evolution thrives on diversity and our ability to respond successfully to environmental and other challenges heavily depends upon our capability to access varying points of view.

Douglas Raybeck writes: « Governments and individuals should be made aware that they would not simply be preserving an endangered language, but… »



Actually, they are aware of those implications. In particular, communities leaders and activists know that their identity and their heritage are largely embedded and carried on through their language. They understand that their survival is inseparable from the perpetuation of their idioms. Therefore, they are ready and eager to promote them.



It is up to the governments to engage the energies and to tap the good will of the peoples. That's how they may guide the continent toward an era of African culture and language renaissance. That means, among other things “studying or encouraging scholars to study” the languages, as Chuka Fred Ononye puts it. 



Today, globalization markets and expands homogenization—in music, sports, consumption, even in linguistic behavior—at the expense of cultural diversity. Due to a weak economy and an inadequate leadership, 
Africa is threatened by such forces. However, it is resilient and it will resist. To counter the onslaught of commercial culture, countries and communities must tap the knowledge of the elders, referred to by James A Green.



Back in the 1960, i.e., before the digital revolution, Amadou Hampâté Bâ coined the phrase: « In Africa, when elder dies, it’s a library burning.»  Such a warning is even more dire today. And it applies to majority as well as minority ethnic communities.



One positive note, though: the same digital revolution brings about highly efficient technologies (hardware and software) that should be harnessed to promote African cultures and languages, which are the foundation of genuine development.

Hello,

Speaking from my experience amongst the indigenous 'tribes" in Northern California, who have been working to rejuvenate their cultural programs with a focus on language retention, I have a few suggestions. 

Create a Community Calendar open to all.

1. For a 1rst meeting invite a community-based focus group (all ages) to identify a year-long list of ceremonial, cultural and familial gatherings of importance and create a community calendar. Present the calendar to the larger community and facilitate discussion as to what events are missing and create an official community calendar, including future meetings, to be available for all. 

2. Meet with local spiritual and community leaders to talk about what these dates mean, why they are significant and plan how you can use these agreed upon events to focus on cultural and linguistic revitalization. Make sure to get an assurance of involvement from these leaders and get their input on seeking community members who will help in the implementation of the first event. 

These are just the first two steps, speaking about what I saw being done here, the youth began to be encouraged to attend language classes that included a performance section and incentives. If the child came to four language meetings they received a small prize and if they participated in a ceremony and or event they would be honored in a traditional manner in front of all of their community. The elders were also encouraged to meet together and perform a ceremony in their language. A big problem in language revitalization is a lack of communication between fluent speakers of those indigenous languages. 

Ultimately what the community calendar and agreed upon events does is create reasons for children/youth, community members, and elders to meet frequently and talk to each other. Cultural revitalization is equally important to linguistic revitalization. 

Tierno,

Re. Amadou phrase.

I have and still recommend not only all archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnologists, but any person in the world to record memories of their past. If you have an elder in your family, ask them about their early life and write down what they say. If possibly, ask them to write a biography of their life and life-ways for posterity. Children and grand-children hear the stories and recollections growing up, but many of those stories and recollections are quickly forgotten or distorted by time.

Our elders are our precious resource.

Definitely, time is of the essence. Perhaps getting the youth involved in interviewing and recording the elder's stories and thoughts for posterity should be one of the first projects to enact.

I appreciate your work concerning the Monuments of the Confederacy Mr. Green.

James,

It's highly likely that the recording of elders' memories is carried out throughout Africa, as a hobby and at the family level. 

What's missing, I suggest, is the larger picture, i.e., (a) the involvement of private and public institutions operating at the societal level (b) the inventory of the available recordings, including individual and family collections (c) a policy, training and resources for processing and sharing —through broadcast radio, webcasting, publishing. What is at stake is the fate of the continent's age-old oral traditions, in each of the five regions: north, west, central, southern, east.

In the US, back in the 1920-1950s, Franz Boaz and his disciples, including Zora Neale Hurston, did a herculean job documenting folklore, verbal art and music. But they had institutional backing, and thus were able to train fieldworkers, in addition to recording on their own.

Such an enabling environment is lacking in Africa, where Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s famous aphorism is largely ignored, Tough!

Manuel,

You might have me confused with another James Green, unless you are talking about my 2017 "Erasing the Confederacy" article on LinkedIn.

Tierno,

All you say is true, but funds, even humanities grants, for such projects are few and far between. However, it is not just Africa, but worldwide we are loosing the knowledge and lore of our ancestors. And, it is not a new problem. I taught a traditional Native American pottery making class to a tribe several years ago. The first thing they told me was that their people had never made pottery because their elders told them so. I informed them that up until about 1820 they had made beautiful pots, but that they lost the ability because they started using European pots and dishes instead. They had lost this knowledge in less than 100 years. They still made woven baskets and, when I showed them the designs of their ancestor's pottery, they were excited because those designs were the traditional designs with which they still decorated their baskets.

Recording the past has to start somewhere. Think about 19th century plantation life in the United States. Of the thousands of plantations and millions of plantation owners, their families, and workers, we have only a handful of diaries that have survived to present in order to give us a better picture of what life was like for those people. If only one in a hundred elders in Africa or China or France wrote about their recollections of the past and only one in a thousand of those survived to be shared with the world, that likely would be a thousand times more than what we have now.

It begins with making people realize what we have already lost. The Memory Keepers are dying and few of the younger generation are picking up the torch of knowledge in their stead.

JAG

Nice work! Congratulations!