Rescue mission: American Indian tribes across the U.S. are working to revive their lost languages.

• Author: Cohen, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

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The Shinnecock and Unkechaug on New York's Long Island have not spoken their native tongues in more than 200 years.

But now, the two Native American nations and Stony Brook University are trying to revive the tribes' lost languages, using yellowed documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791. (See box, facing page.)

The goal is to resuscitate the Shinnecock and Unkechaug languages and get tribe members comfortable snaking them, according to the tribe and researchers involved in the effort.

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, says that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

"When our children study their own language, they perform better academically," he says. "They have a core foundation to rely on."

The New York effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects that have been undertaken by Native Americans in recent years. For many tribes, language is the cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. As one official involved in the effort said, language is "the DNA of a culture."

Historically, language loss occurs for two reasons, says Robert D. Hoberman of Stony Brook University's linguistics department. Some groups voluntarily give up their languages for economic reasons, like immigrants who come to America and learn English. Others, like African slaves and Native Americans, were virtually forced to give up their mother tongues.

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In the 1870s, the federal government set up boarding schools to assimilate Native American children, who were often punished for speaking Indian languages. That came on the heels of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which required Indian tribes to leave their ancestral lands and relocate west of the Mississippi River, eventually to reservations. When older generations of speakers died, there were no new speakers to keep the languages going.

Of the more than 300 indigenous languages once spoken in the U.S., only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute, which tracks the status of endangered languages. It estimates that without restoration efforts, no more than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.

Primary Sources

Language reclamation is a two-step process, according to Hoberman, who oversees the New York project.

"First we have...