learning journal #8

[Yewon Son]

In the cases like the Siletz, with very few remaining people who actually understand their native language, the threat of a language going extinct is real in ways that I could never have imagined with my target language Korean. According to the New York Times article, the current status of the Siletz language was not a sudden extinction, but rather a long process of systemic discrimination that discouraged the use of it. The U.S. government forced the Siletz out of their land, "lumping" them together with various other Native American tribes that spoke a variety of different languages, which not only caused these other tribes' languages to go extinct, but negatively effected the Siletz language itself. The government gave overwhelming pressure to children of the Siletz tribe by forcing them to go to schools that, in the process of trying to "assimilate" them, essentially banned the use of the Siletz language. Over generations, this kind of pressure gradually resulted in fewer people who could speak the language and thus pass it down, until the current situation with the Siletz tribe became reality; of the five people who can speak the language, not one of them grew up with it as a first language. The NYT article showed how crucial of a role a linguist plays in preserving a language like Siletz through this example and various others. The online dictionary that is mentioned several times throughout the article was a vital part of preventing extinction for the Siletz language, and its creation was largely due to a linguist who helped the Siletz tribe. By introducing this technology, and helping to spread awareness about it to other regions of the world, people were able to take interest in the language and it created some social power to then implement other strategies for keeping the language alive (e.g. classes in the language at school). While the process of preventing extinction is possible, albeit difficult, the process of "reviving" a dead language is essentially impossible. The fact that a language died means that its use was no longer necessary for any group of people, and thus the complete resurrection of it in a part of society is impossible; there would simply be no incentive for people to want to go through such an arduous process.