Professor works to save dying language

Tim Thornes, a professor of linguistics at the University of Central Arkansas, looks over his collection of audiotapes of interviews with American Indians from the Burns Paiute tribe.
Tim Thornes, a professor of linguistics at the University of Central Arkansas, looks over his collection of audiotapes of interviews with American Indians from the Burns Paiute tribe.

— Books squeezed together on crowded shelves, a floor of manuscripts and translations stacked atop each other, boxes of audiotapes, maps of the nation’s northwest coast, a blue and orange Indian blanket draped over a quilt rack.

All are part of University of Central Arkansas linguistics professor Tim Thornes’ small office and reflect his 16-year effort to preserve a dying language, specifically Northern Paiute, an endangered American Indian language used less and less by members of the Burns Paiute tribe.

About 4,000 members of the federally recognized tribe live mostly in northern Nevada and eastern Oregon, but only about 300 speak Northern Paiute, Thornes said. Most are older than 50, and all are bilingual, also speaking English, he said.

Last summer, Thornes, who formerly lived in Oregon, returned there for about six weeks to teach at the University of Oregon in Eugene and to help the Burns Paiute preserve their language.

“I think for them it holds a piece of their identity,” Thornes said.

He has worked with tribal elders to tape 150 to 200 hours of recordings of their oral literature - folk tales, autobiographies, poems, history, even information on such cultural traditions as how to prepare choke berries and how to tan a deer hide.

Northern Paiute is one of about 7,000 languages worldwide and about 170 languages indigenous to the United States. “In 50 years, only 15 may be in existence in the United States,” he said last week.

View the video here.

Worldwide, half of the languages now spoken are not expected to be in use by the end of this century, Thornes said.

“There are so many languages in danger of being lost forever,” he said.

The Burns Paiute tribe had no written language, so he and the elders have devised one for recording it on paper for future generations, said Thornes, whose doctoral dissertation was a 700-page grammatical description of Northern Paiute.

Thornes’ current project includes literature written in Northern Paiute but also translated into English as well as a glossary and audio recordings of native speakers telling their stories, sharing their memories.

There are sweet stories such as Nepa Kennedy’s “A Little Bird Called Eeziz,” a story the late tribal elder’s mother used to tell her when they went digging for roots.

There are more historic remembrances such as one titled “Boarding School Days” and narrated by Kennedy, who died at age 92 afew weeks ago.

Thornes said the tribe’s boarding-school history is one of the factors in the language’s gradual disappearance.

Between roughly the 1920s and the early 1960s, Thornes said, the federal government sent Burns Paiute children away to boarding schools where they spoke English and were punished if they spoke their native language.

Parents did not want their children to get in trouble. So, even if adults spoke the language around their children, they did not encourage the youngsters to speak it, even at home, Thornes said.

That is changing.

The tribe now has annual gatherings called Neme Apichaade Semenna, which means People Speaking Together - speaking their native language, that is.

Kennedy was one of the tribe’s main storytellers.

“She just had a phenomenal memory for detail,” Thornes recalled.

Because of her death, Ruth Lewis, another tribal elder and translator, said she will now become a storyteller in the language-preservation project.

Lewis’ adult children understand the language but do not speak it. Of her four grandchildren, just one knows even a little Northern Paiute. He is 24 and understands such things as the names of animals and numbers, said Lewis, a widow who lives on a small reservation north of Burns, Ore.

Each summer under a federal program, Lewis teaches Northern Paiute to first through sixth-graders.

“Right now, children of the modern age, they don’t speak the language at all,” Lewis said. “This is our culture; it’s most important.”

Thornes said in a UCA news release that many see the loss of their language “as a loss of identity at the level of, say, the loss of a set of religious beliefs or practices.

“Imagine if everyone around you stopped speaking the language you knew as a child - the language you learned to tell stories, sing and pray in - and you might have a slight understanding of the personal aspect of what is lost when a language falls silent,” he added.

Arkansas, Pages 19 on 11/28/2010

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