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UNT linguist receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant
DENTON (UNT), Texas -- In 1992, only eight members of the Lower Elwha Klallam American Indian tribe in northwest Washington -- all in their 70s or older -- had grown up speaking Klallam, the tribe's language. Very few members could sing traditional songs and relate tribal legends in folklore in the language. Fifteen years later, a new mother is speaking Klallam to her child as much as she speaks English, and hundreds of others also speak Klallam as a second language, thanks to the dedication of younger tribal members and the help of Dr. Timothy Montler, University of North Texas professor of linguistics. Montler began working with the tribe in 1992 to preserve what was then their rapidly disappearing native language, and has already created computer games for schools in Port Angeles, Wash., near the Lower Elwha Klallam reservation, to teach the language. He has now received a $317,502 Documenting Endangered Languages grant through a joint program of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a Klallam dictionary and electronic text archive. His project was designated an NEH "We The People" project for promoting knowledge and understanding of American history and culture. "A native language is an emblem of an ethnic identity," Montler said. "It is the beautiful, complex product of thousands of years of development. Use of the Klallam language went into decline after World War II, when tribal members began learning English as a first language. When that last generation of native speakers started to pass, the community became aware of the urgent need to save the language." In the early 1990s, he said, the new tribal administrators realized the "social importance of being proud of who you are" and "the significance of language." Staff members of the tribe's cultural office contacted Montler, who had been recommended to them by an anthropologist for Olympic National Park in Washington. Montler began working with the tribe in 1992, visiting the Lower Elwha and other nearby reservations almost every summer. According to the NEH, more than 3,000 of the 6,000 to 7,000 currently used languages in the world, including many Native American languages, are likely to become extinct. Elders of Native American tribes -- the remaining native speakers -- did not teach the language to their children because of their own experiences at government-run boarding schools. Children sent to these schools were disciplined and even beaten for speaking their native language, in the government's attempt to erase the languages of the tribes after Native Americans were allowed to become U.S. citizens in 1925. The Native American Indians Act, signed by President George Bush in October 1990, reversed the U.S. government's policy to suppress Native American languages. A few years later, under the Clinton administration, the government began providing grants to tribes for language preservation. After Montler developed teaching materials, Port Angeles High School began offering Klallam language classes for foreign language credit, and several elementary schools also teach Klallam. Montler said the dictionary and electronic text archive, which staff members at the Klallam Language Program asked him to produce, are two other tools for teaching the language. "The text and the electronic archive will be created together," he said. "Each word will have a reference and a link to a sound file, and the archive will be easily searchable." Montler said the project will continue the work of Dr. Laurence C. Thompson, his doctoral professor at the University of Hawaii. Thompson and his wife, M. Terry Thompson, were the first linguists to collect and publish grammatical information on Klallam, working on the reservations from 1967 to 1971. In 1978, as a new doctoral student, Montler became Thompson's assistant and made his first trip to the Elwha reservation. He planned to gather linguistic data about Klallam for his doctoral dissertation and a dictionary Thompson was writing. After two years, however, he switched to studying Saanich, a language similar to Klallam spoken by the Salish tribe living on nearby Vancouver island, and received a working knowledge of the language, which helped him learn Klallam. In addition to the thousands of pages of notes and hundreds of hours of recordings on the Klallam language that he has collected, Montler now has 500 pages of notes and 30 hours of recordings that the Thompsons gathered. He said their work is particularly valuable for him because his professor "worked with speakers who were from Jamestown and Port Gamble, at the opposite end of Klallam territory from where I worked." Montler added the Thompsons also interviewed elders who were a generation older than those he interviewed. Already the author of 47 chapters of a not-yet-published Klallam grammar reference book, Montler said he hopes the dictionary and electronic text archive will be immediately used by members of the tribe and students learning Klallam in the Port Angeles schools. With the Klallam Language Program now providing texts of folktales in the native language, those learning Klallam "have reached a point where a simple wordlist is not enough," he said. "A comprehensive Klallam dictionary is needed now and must be done now, while I still have native-speaking elders to help me," he said.
UNT News Service Phone Number: (940) 565-2108
Contact: Nancy Kolsti (940) 565-3509
Email: nkolsti@unt.edu
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