ipl-logo

Native American Language Diversity

1000 Words4 Pages

Scholars estimate that throughout the world as many as one to two endangered languages are lost to extinction on a bi-weekly basis. K. David Harrison states:
“When a community loses its language, they really lose their history. They lose their connection to the past. They lose all the wisdom and knowledge that has been accumulated through the centuries about how to live in a sustainable manner on this planet” (“Native American Languages: Loss and Revitalization” 2).
Human diversity is in no small part measured by the languages that we – as a species – speak. Our world is quickly shrinking in regards to linguistic and cultural diversity. And this has been then case since the 1950’s; when the number of differing languages spoken around the around began its steady decline. However, in the Americas, language preservation has been fighting a losing battle since Europeans …show more content…

This lead to students primarily speaking English; only using their native language at home or with extended family. Some Native Americans went as far as to outright refuse to teach their children their native language, in an attempt to protect them from similar hardships (Dick and McCarty). General Richard C. Pratt was the founder of the Native American boarding school system and was somewhat famously – or should I say infamously? – quoted as saying that his schools would, “kill the Indian to save the man” (Haynes 2). Navajo was one of the languages that was most heavily affected by the Native American boarding school system. Impressionable speakers of Navajo – more specifically children – were susceptible to the social, psychological, and linguistic effects of the boarding school system. Many students who experienced the boarding school system internalized the idea that their native language was “second best” or was in some way lesser than English (Dick and

Show More
Related
523 Words | 3 Pages

The perception was that Native American adults had a limited ability to learn new skills and concepts. Later in the report, it is expressed that children learn little at day school, causing their “tastes to be fashioned at home, and [their] inherited aversion to toil is in no way combated. ”11 Davin recommended that similar industrial boarding schools should be built in Canada, which would attempt to assimilate Native children into the European culture.12 Nicholas Flood Davin’s research and advances about the industrial schools in America, was important in the creation and developing of the Residential school system in

Read More
127 Words | 1 Pages

Northeast Native Americans Communication The Native Americans of the Northeast’s communication is Iroquoian and Algonquian. The Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Seneca, Onondaga, and Tuscarora spoke the Iroquoian language. The Algonquian language is going extinct, there for they are learning different languages to speak with other tribes. The Northeast language is endangered because they wanted to speak different languages to speak with different tribes. Their number system was made up of various shapes and lines (located next to the tepes).

Read More
1262 Words | 6 Pages

These schools have been described as an instrument to wage intellectual, psychological, and cultural warfare to turn Native Americans into “Americans”. There are many reports of young Native Americans losing all cultural belonging. According to an interview with NPR, Bill Wright was sent to one of these schools. He lost his hair, his language, and then his Navajo name. When he was able to return home, he was unable to understand or speak to his grandmother.

Read More
865 Words | 4 Pages

World War II was one of the biggest wars the world has ever witnessed. If the US hadn’t stopped the Japanese and Germans our way of life could be completely different. The balance of the world could be shifted forever. Although many Americans give credit to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for ending the war other things or people contributed majorly to the ending of World War II. A code, still undeciphered to this day, should be given major credit for the US’ success during the war.

Read More
1427 Words | 6 Pages

In the online article by Max J. Castro, Ph. D, The Future of Spanish in the United States, the author effectively uses his credibility to link facts and history of other languages to Spanish along with appealing to the reader’s emotions to explain why the longevity of the Spanish language is possibly threatened in the United States. In his article, Castro refers to a plethora of statistical information about Spanish as a language in the United States, including that it is predicted to be the largest Spanish speaking country in the world by 2050. Even today Spanish is by far the second most spoken language in America, second only to English. Although the amount of Spanish speakers is increasing, Castro also mentions in his article, largely concerned,

Read More
990 Words | 4 Pages

Ethan Shevin Mr. Henderson U.S History 10/22/2015 Lingua Franca between the Native Americans and the Europeans In the 16th century, Europeans arrived onto the “New World”. This side of the World had never been discovered and was completely unknown according to the Europeans. This undiscovered world was soon to be colonized by the foreigners, but there was one discovery that interested and put perspective into the new comers.

Read More
1154 Words | 5 Pages

Many Native Hawaiian people have lost touch with their culture. Many people around the world don’t know about the unique Hawaiian culture. People in America don’t know a lot about these unique Hawaiian arts either. Many of the old Hawaiian traditions were lost because foreigners took over the Hawaiian islands and banned many Hawaiian traditions that have been going on for decades. This loss of culture was devastating for the people and was hard to gain back after almost being completely eliminated.

Read More
268 Words | 2 Pages

Language is vital part of geography, and it is one of the first defining attributes of a nation and impacts greatly the culture. The author in the book The Power of Place, De Blij shares how many societies are working hard to preserve their languages, as if their livelihood depends on it. The author states that even though our world is “flattening” and many more people are speaking the same language this will not stop conflicts. I found this to be an interesting point, as one would think better communication would lead to more peace. This rolled right into his thoughts on the how major languages like Latin now have split into many different branches with the infusion of local culture.

Read More
1138 Words | 5 Pages

The nature of these boarding schools was to assimilate young Native Americans into American culture, doing away with any “savageness” that they’re supposedly predisposed to have. As Bonnin remembers the first night of her stay at the school, she says “I was tucked into bed with one of the tall girls, because she talked to me in my mother tongue and seemed to soothe me” (Bonnin 325). Even at the beginning of such a traumatic journey, the author is signaling to the audience the conditioning that she was already under. Bonnin instinctively sought out something familiar, a girl who merely spoke in the same “tongue” as her. There are already so few things that she has in her immediate surroundings that help her identify who and what she is, that she must cling to the simple familiarities to bring any semblance of comfort.

Read More
389 Words | 2 Pages

The Tlingit of today are putting into action talking about their boarding school experiences in the 1800s in order to heal themselves and generations’ still suffering from it. The nonprofit local urban Native Corporation is using the stories to create a curriculum for K-12 about the impacts of colonialism on the Tlingit people. As I discussed in one of my previous blogs, from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, the federal government split up families and forced the Native children into boarding schools to become civilized. Many were also raised in orphanages.

Read More
1021 Words | 5 Pages

The Impacts of the American Boarding Schools on Indians Introduction Prior to the arrival of the first generation immigrants who disrupted the social and political setups of the Indians, there had been one social unit strung together in their beliefs, unity, and a drive for survival and existence (Mayo, 2014). However, the first generation immigrants proved superior and later even subjected them to systems that they had never anticipated (Charla, 2008). Amongst such systems were the boarding schools that came in place of their cultural/informal schools. The Indians’ boarding school experiences, as was described by Zitkala-Sa (2015), began in the 1860 with the government later establishing over 100 schools particularly for this purpose. While

Read More
1278 Words | 6 Pages

Indian Boarding schools were created in the 1800s to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” They achieved this by transforming the natives looks, culture, language, and teaching them a certain way so they would be able to function in a “european society”. Indian boarding schools taught students both academic and “real world” skills, but they did so while ripping the indians from their culture. Most indian boarding schools were the same with their tactics in transforming the native man into a white one.

Read More
611 Words | 3 Pages

In “Let them die” essay, Kenan Malik assert that endangered languages in the world should be left to dead. In other word, the minority languages should not be preserved, because it is not related to the achievement of “cultural diversity” (Malik, 3). Indeed, he expresses, dying languages should be removed in order to reach the “dynamic and responsive” (Malik, 6) culture. However, the claims that Malik uses in his essay does not tackle the counter argument correctly. In addition, the evidences in the essay is not clear.

Read More
223 Words | 1 Pages

American boarding schools had a profoundly negative impact on two of the most important aspects of American Indian cultures: language and spirituality. Boarding schools challenged the very composition of Indian cultures by forbidding tribal languages and the customs they reflected from being used by the Indian children from the moment they first arrived. This weakening was accomplished by forcibly separating those children from their families, and by severely punishing those children who deviated from the cultural norms imposed upon them. These schools then enforced a reliance on the Christian religious paradigm and displaced the spiritual beliefs that were centuries old that these children brought with them (Sanchez and Stuckey, 1999).

Read More
720 Words | 3 Pages

Other than the global languages we talk and learn, there are languages we can’t learn, yes the languags we aren’t able to learn. Languages, and with languages big or small cultures are forgetten due to the conditions we live in. Languages die out and become endangered more than we know in the world. The three aspects for why languages die out that I’m going to lean on are; popular culture, immigration and social-job life.

Read More

More about Native American Language Diversity

Related Topics

Open Document