Fall 1999
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When Lewis and Clark trudged into what became present-day Oregon, the region was peopled by Native American groups speaking 25 to 30 distinct languages. Today, less than two hundred years later, all but a handful of these languages are extinct.
"We can't go back and recreate the languages that are already lost, but we can work to preserve those that still remain," says Scott DeLancey, a University of Oregon professor of linguistics.
After joining the UO faculty in 1982 as an expert in the languages of Tibet and Burma, DeLancey noticed that the remaining Native languages in Oregon were receiving little attention from scholars. The attention the languages had received previously was "in most cases a long time ago and often not done very well," he says.
About the same time, Native Americans across the country were growing increasingly concerned about language conservation. Members of the Klamath Tribe from southern Oregon, for example, approached DeLancey for help in preserving their rapidly declining language.
"I started meeting with a few of the remaining speakers of Klamath," Delancey recalls. "I felt a sense of urgency because the language was so close to being lost."
DeLancey began studying the work of M. A. R. Barker, a linguist from the University of California at Berkeley who worked with the Klamath language in the 1950s. Barker published a dictionary and a grammar for Klamath.
"Unfortunately, he wrote explicitly for linguists in his own idiosyncratic and quite peculiar theoretical framework," DeLancey explains. "So his work is almost incomprehensible even for linguists and completely incomprehensible to anyone else."
A third-generation professor, DeLancey was undaunted by the challenge; he spent two years deciphering Barker's efforts and gaining a working knowledge of Klamath. His translations of Barker's arcane scholarship into a more useful form began to pay off in 1988, when he started teaching a class in Klamath to tribe members in the southeast Oregon town of Chiloquin. With the support of local tribe members, the near-extinct language began to revive.
Recently, one of DeLancey's students, a doctoral candidate named Janne Underriner, helped tribe members write a grant proposal for a Klamath-language revitalization program. The federal Administration for Native Americans approved the grant application, which will pay for two people to spend time with older native speakers of Klamath.
"The idea is for the younger participants to become fluent speakers, then take that knowledge and teach it to the next generation," DeLancey says.
In support of this work, Underriner has developed a curriculum for teaching Klamath to kindergartners. It was used last year at Chiloquin Elementary School. This year she is developing a curriculum for first graders.
DeLancey's efforts have not been limited to the Klamath. He has directed graduate students who have worked with a number of other tribes, including the Siletz, Burns Paiute, Grand Ronde, and Umatilla. For the past two years, DeLancey and his students have run The Northwest Indian Language Institute, an intensive summer program on the UO campus for tribal members.
"We try to get across a useful version of the basics of linguistics," DeLancey says. "We go into linguistic analysis of their language and linguistic teaching methodology. Passing on a language with so few speakers is much harder than, say, teaching a very common language like Spanish. We try to address those difficulties."
About 25 teachers representing eight Oregon and Washington tribes have passed through the summer institute.
DeLancey says he considers these efforts a form of community service.
"The UO is a state institution, and it is appropriate that people in the state who need scholarship or academic support should be able to look to us for help and advice. The members of the tribes have a heartfelt and admirable desire to preserve their languages. What I have to offer them is my academic skills," DeLancey says. " I was asked to help, so I am helping."