Native Language in a Global World

Today's teens will face finding the answers to tough questions. Some of those questions will concern the role of Native American sovereignty, the rise of the Chinese economy, illegal immigration, and the situation in the Middle East. A common factor in all these questions is language - being able to communicate in a global world.

In honor of Muskogee Public School's Indian Heritage Week celebration, Harry Oosahwee, instructor of Cherokee language at Northeastern State University, spoke to the Advanced Placement Latin class at Muskogee High School.
Oosahwee stressed the importance of language in understanding one's culture. Tribal languages, he said, have been dying at an alarming rate, not just among Native American tribes, but world-wide. As the elders die, knowledge of the language dies with them. It is estimated that over the course of the last few years a language has been lost at the rate of one every two weeks.

This was a process Latin students understood well, having just studied the Celts while reading Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War. The loss of native languages for Western Europeans began well over a thousand years ago with the slow absorption of Latin into tribal languages and later with the spread of English. For instance, the Celtic language of Cornish is now spoken by about only 300 people living in England, Australia and the U.S. An attempt to revive it has been made by teaching children Cornish and offering Cornish classes at the University of Exeter.

Similarly, Oosahwee said through tribal efforts and the addition of a Cherokee language degree at NSU, more young people are becoming fluent in Cherokee. While more speakers are lost than are gained at the moment, Oosahwee sees the degree program at NSU as a hope for keeping the language alive.

"Sa' quui, ta-li, tso-i, nv-qi, hi-s-gi," the students count after Oosahwee. Senior Kylor Brice, who has had four years of Latin and is also in his first year of Chinese at MHS, finds it simple to understand the structural scheme of Cherokee cardinal numbers.

"All languages I have studied seem to follow the same paradigms," said Brice. "If you know the numbers from one to ten, then logic tells you what will come next."

What will come next for Latin or Cherokee is hard to predict in our changing world of increased Chinese and Spanish emphasis. Each language represents a tradition symbolizing the way of life and mind-set of its speakers. While Latin will never come back as a native tongue, Cherokee has prospects of returning to a viable living language, keeping alive the long traditions of tribal heritage.

While language is an emotionally charged issue, success in the modern world for now remains via English. The ACT and SAT are currently given only in English, and a clear understanding of English is a necessity for broadening one's opportunity, no matter what one's cultural background. While our teens will face the problem of an official language for America in the future, for the time being any parent who cares about his child’s future success will ensure that his teen can read and write in grammatically correct English. It is the key to their success in the modern business world.