Thousand of languages were spoken in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans- it is estimated that there are 175 Native American languages spoken in the United States today.
The loss of Native languages was hastened by the U.S government polices that focused on assimilating Native Americans into western culture. Many Native children were sent to government-run boarding schools where they were prohibited from speaking their languages.
Only 8 indigenous languages within the continental United States currently have a population of speakers in the U.S and Canada large enough to populate a medium-sized town. Only Navajo still has a population greater than 25,000 within the U.S.
Linguists citing statistics from a 1993 Census Bureau report predicted the decline and further extinction of many traditional languages by the year 2000.
In 1990, Congress passed Native American Languages Act of 1990, declaring policy that Native Americans were entitled to use their own languages. This Act set provisions within the bill to preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedoms of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages. The bill goes on further to state, the encouragement and support of the use of Native languages as a medium of instruction in order to support the survival of Native languages.
The Native American Languages Act of 1990 reversed the U.S. government's historical policy of discouraging the use of native languages.
While NALA supports the survival and revival of many Native languages funding through the bill still remains inadequate for all tribes interested in Immersion Schools, where student's curriculum would be taught in their native tongue, or for funding for tribes to develop programs to revive and teach their ancestral language.
Learning a new language can actually make parts of the brain grow, according to new research from Sweden. The parts that grew were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure that is involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.
Additional Links:
- The Center for American Indian Languages
- The Indigenous Language Institute
- National Alliance to Save Native Languages
- Native Language Given a Boost: Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act - Friends Committee on National Legislation - 3/14/08
- Fighting for Validity: The Credentialing of Native Language Teachers - Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival - 2008
- Teaching American Indian and Alaska Native Languages in the Schools: What Has Been Learned - Education Resources Information Center - December 1999
