SDLC 105 Learning Journal #8

[Daniel Matthew Kunath]

Languages often go extinct when nobody is taught them as a first language anymore. In the case of Siletz Dee-ni, the language was discouraged and actively stamped out by the conquering American government. Schools and reservations were established to minimize its influence on the continent, and it fell to only five known people who still understand it. When a language dies, even if we still have some writings, then we lose any chance to fully appreciate the peoples which spoke it and the depth of their culture, and we can only learn about it from archaeology and hypothesis, rather than from conversations. I don’t believe that a dead language can ever really eb brought back to life. While a people may begin to speak it again, the chain of tradition has been broken, and it will be almost as though they began to speak an entirely new language.