What we can’t say is often who we are.

     I was thinking about a little part of military history and it caused me to question myself. I thought the questioning and answering was a good experience so I want to share it with you and you can, in turn, share it with me and everyone else.

     Think about your lineage. Are your ancestors Irish, Scottish, or maybe Native American? Are they South African, Chinese, Indian, Samoan, or Maori? What are they? I am all from the British Isles. I am Scottish on my mother’s side, Welsh, and Irish on my father’s side.

     Do you show your lineage? Is your skin very light, very dark, or somewhere in between and what about your body and your face? I have high cheekbones and strawberry blonde hair with a very red beard. My skin is so pale that you can see all the veins on my chest and I have a sunburn from sitting outside for three hours yesterday while I read Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

     Do you speak your lineage? Everyone in this class speaks English and possibly some proficiency of another language as a product of mandatory coursework. I speak German (probably like a three year old, but with great pronunciation). Do you speak a language from your family’s culture? I don’t speak Scottish or Irish Gaelic or Welsh.

     How does that make you feel? Do you feel distant and separated from your genetic history? What about pride or responsibility to who you are? As for pride, I would like to be able to speak any of my ancestral languages. As for responsibility, about half a million people speak Welsh and the same goes for Irish Gaelic. Over sixty thousand speak Scottish Gaelic so that is the only one that is in a danger area for language, but Scottish Parliament has passed a law requiring education in the language as well as dual-language verbiage on all government writings (signs, pamphlets, forms, etc.) so it is in no real danger of dying out.

     Imagine that you are a child or young adult and you are faced with the decision to choose whether to learn or not to learn an ancestral language. Choose to and you make yourself the new last generation for that language and are responsible for carrying into the generation after you. Choose not to and you are disregarding the language and possibly helping it become extinct. What kind of burden is that? If there are half a million people speakers or if a world power’s government mandates the language, does the responsibility seem that strong? What if there are twenty thousand or ten thousand speakers? What if there is less than that?

     There are about thirty(30) language families (creating hundreds of languages) in originating in North America (compare that to about five(5) in Europe). This diversity is amazing, but it unfortunately adds to the decline of the languages.

     Of the Native American languages, only Navaho has over one hundred thousand(100,000) speakers. Less than ten(10) languages (not language families) currently have more than ten thousand(10,000). That means the vast majority of these Native American languages are either extinct or very close to it.

Comparison – Speakers of Blackfoot (Algic family) 10,000

                        Students at WKU 20,000

If only half of the students at WKU spoke a special language, they would equal the all of the Blackfoot Indians that still speak the language of their ancestors.

Here is an organization that is working to save these languages. http://www.native-languages.org/index.htm#tree

     How much a part of you is your language? Zonana’s connection with her ancestral language was so strong that she had a great conflict of feelings as to whether or not she should learn it. Alexie’s characters often use versions of traditional or famous Indian phrases and words in some way or another and many of his characters talk with a distinctly Indian rhythm.

     As for the original subject that got me thinking about this question of preserving language, I was thinking about the Navajo Code Talkers that the Marine Corps. used during WWII. American had a unique language with no written component and no speakers outside of the U.S. It was the perfect way to encrypt communications and it is the only modern military code that was never cracked (by the enemy or our own cryptologists). The Navajo were eager to help and volunteered for the unit (and the military in general), even though they had been placed on barren reservations, disregarded, and left destitute by the American government. Ted Draper summed up an ironic thought for many of the Code Talkers when he reminisced, “When I was going to boarding school, the U.S. government told us not to speak Navajo, but during the war, they wanted us to speak it!"

If you want to see how the warrior spirit survives into this century, here is a link to their site. http://navajocodetalkers.org/

You can also read Kenji Kawani’s book, Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers.

                                                                                                                       -Japheth