Saving a Language

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To relearn vocabulary and grammar, they compared MIT's copy of the Eliot Indian Bible with the King James Bible from which it was translated. They also examined other 17th- and 18th-­century Native American texts, including letters, petitions to the government, other legal documents, and about 20 of Eliot's religious tracts. And they compared these examples with other languages in the Algonquian family, a group of roughly three dozen languages that includes Wôpanâak. The dictionary of Wôpanâak that Baird started compiling with Hale in 1996 has burgeoned to 10,000 words.

Since receiving a master's degree in linguistics in 2000, Baird has spent much of her time teaching Wôpanâak to citizens of her nation. She has also written 17 books, including Wôpanâak storybooks, phrase books, workbooks, and prayer books. Out of about 4,000 Wampanoags, an estimated 200 have taken a Wôpanâak class, and seven are fluent. And Baird is raising her three-year-old daughter, Mae Alice, to be bilingual, making her the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations. Teaching her people to speak and read Wôpanâak, she says, "is like taking care of your family."

Hale retired from MIT in 1999 but continued to consult with Baird and his MIT successor, Norvin Richards, PhD '97, a specialist in Native American and aboriginal Australian languages. Hale lived to see the 2001 publication of The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, a fieldwork manual he edited with Leanne Hinton. And just before he died of cancer that year, he told Baird that helping the Wampanoags restore their language was one of his proudest accomplishments. At his memorial service, eulogies rang out in Navajo, Hopi, and Warlpiri. Baird offered a prayer in Wôpanâak.

"Chills just overtake you," said Tobias Vanderhoop, a member of the Gay Head Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal council, describing to an AP reporter what it felt like to hear the language spoken. "You know your ancestors can understand it. So it is a very powerful thing."

Baird, Richards, and others hope that enough people will become fluent in Wôpanâak to make the language self-­perpetuating. They know that preserving endangered languages is vital to studying the acquisition of speech, since different languages illuminate this innate capacity in different ways. But like their mentor, Ken Hale, they also see such restoration efforts as vital to maintaining indigenous cultures and preserving their literary wealth for future generations. "There are jokes that are only funny in Maliseet, and there are stories that only make sense in Lardil, and there are songs that are only beautiful in Wôpanâak," Richards says. "If we lose those languages, we lose little pieces of the beauty and richness of the world."

Read an article on how linguists revive a long-unspoken language according to associate professor Norvin Richards, PhD '97.