Tribal communities in North America believe that their traditional languages are valuable resources that must be maintained. However, these traditional languages can fall into disuse when some of the effects of the majority culture on tribal life serve as barriers between a community and its traditional forms of social, economic, or spiritual serious and have taken action to prevent it, primarily through community self-teaching.
Before any community can systemically and formally teach a traditional language to its younger members, it must first document the language’s grammar; for example, a group of Northern Utes spent two years conducting a thorough analysis and classification of Northern Ute linguistic structures. The grammatical information is then arranged in sequence from in ways that will be most useful and appropriate to the culture.
Certain obstacles can stand in the way of developing these teaching methods. One is the difficulty a community may encounter when it attempts to write down elements (particularly the spellings of words) of a language that has been primarily oral for centuries, as is often the case with traditional languages. Sometimes this unique written equivalent—a desirable but ultimately frustrating condition that no written language has ever fully satisfied.
Another obstacle is dialect. There may be many language traditions in a particular community; which one is to be written down and taught? The Northern Utes decided not to standardize their language, agreeing that various phonetic spellings of words would be accepted as long as their meanings were clear. Although this troubled instruction in the Northern Ute language, even elementary school children could write and speak it effectively.
It has been argued that the attempt to write down traditional languages is misguided and unnecessary; after all, in many cases these languages have been transmitted in their oral form since their origins. Defenders of the practice counter that they are writing down their languages precisely because of a general decline in effort to eschew aspects of the majority culture that make this preservation difficult.
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