Rebirth of a language Linguists, computer bring back nearly extinct Nooksack dialect

Associated Press

DEMING, Wash. _ When Quentin Charlie first tried to speak his grandmother's language, the complicated, singsong words didn't come naturally.

But he kept trying at the Nooksack Tribe's Upriver Halq'emeylem language classes.

The language was nearly extinct 30 years ago, but Nooksack language specialist Catalina Renteria thinks Charlie and the rest of her students may be fluent by next fall, when they become the program's first graduating class.

They'll be the first Native language students in the country to learn with an interactive computer program she adapted to Halq'emeylem.

Roland Holterman, director of the Nooksack Education Department, called Renteria's project a breakthrough and said he envisions local school districts offering the classes for foreign-language credits soon.

"We've taken a nearly extinct language and brought it back to life," Holterman said. "You can actually not speak a single word ... and in the matter of a year you can be totally fluent."

Linguist Brent Galloway came to the Nooksack Tribe's 21/2-acre reservation near Deming, about 15 miles northeast of Bellingham, in 1974 -- a year after the United States officially recognized the tribe.

Because the Nooksacks refused to sign the Treaty of Point Elliott in January 1855, the tribe was allotted no land and its members were ordered to move to the Lummi Reservation.

But the Lummi and Nooksack people had little in common, except for their roots in what is now Whatcom County. Their languages were about as similar as German and English, Galloway said. So some Nooksacks settled in east Whatcom County and many others moved north to be with Halq'emeylem-speaking people of the Stolo Nation near Chilliwack, British Columbia.

As time passed, the Nooksack's original language -- Lhechelesem -- withered away. The last fluent speaker, Sindick Jimmy, died in 1977.

Galloway, now a professor at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in Regina, Saskatchewan, said Nooksack elders told him they made a conscious choice to abandon Lhechelesem.

"Since the language died that long ago, the elders that were left were speakers of Halq'emeylem," Galloway said. "So there was more hope they could bring it back."

Halq'emeylem is one of 23 distinct Salish languages spoken by tribes from the Pacific Coast west to Montana and as far south as Tillamook, Ore. Upriver Halq'emeylem, the spoken language at Nooksack, is the only tonal language among them. Every vowel has three different tones that shift the meaning of the word.

For the past year, Renteria and Marcus Goodson, a Nooksack language intern, have videotaped discussions in Halq'emeylem, written sentences and tests, and entered them into the computer language program.

To demonstrate, Goodson opened a window on one of the computers, and the Halq'emeylem alphabet popped up on screen. Another window opened with a video of a man in a pink shirt.

As the video played, the man mouthed the popped and guttural clicks of the coastal languages. Goodson echoed the words, speaking into a microphone, and the program played a recording of his pronunciation back-to-back with the man in the video.

"You see it, you hear it, you say it," Goodson said.

The tribal elders who grew up speaking the language are getting very old now -- a problem shared by tribes around the country. For decades, their languages were forbidden at many white-operated schools, and tribal members began using English instead.

"I would ask the elders in the 1970s, when I was working on the writing system, how technical should we be?" Galloway said. "And they said, write in all the tones because we may not be able to understand it now, but our grandchildren will go to college and they will understand it.

"Sure enough, all the children use computers now."

-- Anonymous, February 19, 2002