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Language revitalization and language pedagogy: New teaching and learning

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 Language and Education
Vol. 25, No. 4, July 2011, 307–318

Language revitalization and language pedagogy: new teaching and

learning strategies
Leanne Hinton∗

Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

(Received 30 March 2011; final version received 30 March 2011)
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Language learning and teaching of endangered languages have many features and needs
that are quite different from the teaching of world languages. Groups whose languages
are endangered try to turn language loss around; many new language teaching and
learning strategies are emerging, to suit the special needs and goals of language re-
vitalization. The teaching of ‘foreign languages’, ‘majority languages’, ‘heritage lan-
guages’ and endangered languages is compared in this paper. Because of the paucity
of language teaching resources for endangered languages, and especially because of
the special goals of learning for language revitalization, individuals and communities
and the professionals who work with them are developing novel ways of teaching and
learning their ancestral language, to meet the goals of language learners and their
communities.
Keywords: language revitalization; Indigenous languages; immersion schools; lan-
guages without speakers; language teaching methods; language learning methods

Introduction
Indigenous and minority communities around the world are making strong efforts to regain
knowledge and use of their endangered languages. Even the so-called ‘extinct’ languages
are being revitalized through the use of documentation. Depending on the size of the group
and their available human resources, there are different opportunities and limitations on
the kinds of program that they can realistically muster. Language immersion schools (e.g.
Hawaiian, Ojibwe, Mohawk), where the language of instruction is the endangered language,
are highly successful, but small communities with few speakers and little control of their
education system may not be able to implement this kind of program. Other options being
implemented include summer immersion programs (e.g. Cochiti), or language classes in
otherwise English-medium schools (e.g. Hupa, Acoma). One problem for many groups is
that the language is natively spoken only by elders, who are often too old to teach. Adult
programs such as intensive college programs (Hawaii again) and the Master-Apprentice
language learning program are being used to train the ‘missing generations’ who are of
professional age and able to go on to teach children. Another kind of program is aimed
at families rather than schools, supporting and training parents who want to use their
endangered language with children at home (e.g. Gaelic). Finally, even languages with
no speakers left at all can begin the process of revitalization through the utilization of
linguistic documentation that was done with the last speakers (e.g. Miami, Wampanoag).

∗
Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0950-0782 print / ISSN 1747-7581 online

C 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2011.577220
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 308 L. Hinton

See also Hinton (2008) and Hinton (2011) for a fuller description of some of these and
other language programs. Here, we focus primarily on what these programs show us about
second language learning and teaching.

Second language teaching and endangered languages

Second language learning and teaching are key components in all of the above kinds of
language revitalization programs. For many communities involved in language revitaliza-
tion, there are few programs or experts who can help them develop workable methods of
second language teaching and learning. And in fact, the ways in which languages are taught
in the classroom do not generally fulfill the needs of language revitalization (Penfield and
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Tucker 2011). To a large extent, the models, methods and materials for second language
teaching and learning are developed by bootstrap strategies within revitalization programs.
The resources, motives and desired outcomes for second language instruction are very
different from the teaching of foreign languages, and also from the majority of language
programs such as English as a Second Language (ESL).
One of the most important things for communities doing this kind of work is the theory
and methodology of second language teaching and learning (Hinton 2007). Although
pedagogical courses on endangered Indigenous languages are available in some colleges
and universities, it is rare to find a program leading to second language fluency for its
students. This is partly because most of the endangered Indigenous languages have few
fluent speakers of a professional age who could teach, and in many cases, those speakers are
untrained in language pedagogy. Furthermore, materials and curricula usually have to be
designed by the teachers themselves, rather than having any such thing as a state-of-the-art
curriculum handed to them as would be the case with world languages. Thus, language
teaching and learning of endangered languages is a pioneering process that involves the
development of new models of language teaching.
Some of the differences between teaching a foreign, majority or heritage language
and the teaching of endangered languages are summarized in Table 1. A few words need
to be said about the definitions of these language categories. By ‘foreign language’, I
mean a language spoken primarily in places other than the country in which the lan-
guage is being taught. By ‘majority language’, I mean a language that is supported by
the government within a nation and spoken by the majority of citizens. (There are of
course countries, such as many in Asia and Africa, for which this definition is problem-
atic – but my primary focus for this category is on hegemonic languages such as English
in the USA.) ‘Heritage languages’ and ‘endangered languages’ have various definitions,
some of which overlap. ‘Heritage language’ has come to mean, in its narrow concep-
tion, a language different from the majority language of the country, which is spoken at
home but was only partially acquired by the children of the home (Polinsky and Kagan
2007; Valdés 2000).
While endangered languages are frequently viewed as a subcategory of heritage lan-
guages (e.g. Valdés 2005), for the sake of contrast, I will reserve the term ‘heritage lan-
guages’ to refer to those languages which are not the majority language of the country, but
where there is also some place in the world where the language is not endangered. Thus,
German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and many other languages are heritage
languages in the United States, but are not endangered languages (even if their tenure in the
United States is in question. Also see Cope 2011).1 To separate this definition of heritage
languages from endangered languages, I will use the term ‘ancestral languages’ or just ‘en-
dangered languages’ for the latter. Furthermore, ‘endangered languages’ include ancestral
 Language and Education 309

Table 1. Differences in teaching languages of different status.

Foreign Majority Heritage Endangered

languages languages languages languages
1. Primary goal Helping people Helping people Helping people Save language from
of the program gain knowledge function in the gain ability in extinction; bring it
of language dominant their ancestral back into use
and culture of language of the tongue
another society society
2. Learner’s Communication Acquire a sense Ability to speak Sense of identity,
motives with foreigners of membership to older belonging to a
or immigrants in the dominant relatives; retain minority culture;
at home or culture; gain or regain ties to resistance to
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abroad; economic one’s home assimilation;

develop literary power country; political stance
knowledge of belonging to a about cultural and
another minority linguistic
language culture; autonomy;
political stance spiritual and
about cultural cultural access
and linguistic
autonomy
3. Expected Tourist, teacher, Linguistic Speaking or Become a language
future job where the assimilation to writing to activist and a
relationship of language is the dominant friends and transmitter of the
the learner to used society relatives; visits language to future
the language and other ties generations
to one’s country (through teaching,
of origin parenthood); help
form a language
community
4. Possible None None (or New None on the Influence of a
influence on Englishes) language as dominant
the language spoken in the language (e.g.
being learned home country; English) on the
possible endangered
establishment language;
of a new dialect modernization of
in the new the endangered
country language
5. Considerations Big literature on Big literature on Development of Evolving strategies,
for teaching language language heritage learner including
teaching, lots teaching, lots courses to ‘bootstrap’
of research, lots of research, lots accommodate methods
of available of available differences in
tools and tools and learning needs
materials materials

Note: I will examine the items in the table in more detail in the following sections.

languages that may not have been heard or learned in the least by people who see them as
an important part of their identity, thus separating them further from the narrow definition
of heritage languages. I am also using the term ‘endangered languages’ rather loosely here
to cover even those languages with no speakers left at all, but where revitalization might
nevertheless take place.
 310 L. Hinton

Goals of the program

For learning foreign and heritage languages, and majority languages, a primary goal of a
language program is to give the learners competency in communicating with the native
speakers of that language. For endangered languages, there may be very few monolingual
native speakers, and perhaps none at all. Instead, the goal would be to create the speakers
who will themselves carry the language on even if the last native speakers have passed
away. This has many important implications for teaching methods and philosophies that
will be discussed throughout the paper. As for learning the culture along with the language,
frequently that aspect too is being revitalized, so that rather than learning ‘how others do
things’, as would be the case for foreign and majority languages, a goal may be to have the
learners themselves become able to carry on and enhance the practice of the traditions of
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their culture.

Motives of the learners

One difference between the learning of endangered languages versus foreign and major-
ity languages is that in most cases, the endangered language is the ancestral language of
the learners. Endangered languages are usually endangered because conquest, oppressive
policies or economic needs have resulted in a language shift. That this shift is unaccept-
able to the current generations of the minority groups is clear from the fact that efforts
at language revitalization are taking place. Thus, learners (or, in the case of children,
their parents), teachers and program administrators alike have a resistance to language
loss that provides a different kind of motivation toward learning the target language. For
some, it is a personal desire to regain a sense of their native identity and belonging to a
community. For others, it is a political act, part of a desire to assert cultural autonomy or
sovereignty.
Some of the personal motives of the second or third generations of immigrants whose
families have shifted to the dominant language of the culture are similar to the motives
of the learners of endangered languages (and of course their own languages may also
be endangered in some cases). There is a strong tendency for the younger generations
in immigrant families to enroll in foreign language courses to gain competency in their
heritage language (Cope 2011; Hinton 2001).

Expected future relationship of the learner to the language

A difference between most heritage languages and endangered languages is that for the lat-
ter, there is no real speech community using the language anywhere. While the descendants
of the immigrants might wish to redevelop ties to speech communities of the old country, in
the case of the endangered languages, the goal might be to recreate a language community,
which will primarily consist of the second language learners themselves. Thus, the learners
are taking on a responsibility that far outweighs the responsibility of the learners to the
other three kinds of languages. It is recognized that the goal of bringing an endangered
language back into use again, to once more have native speakers using their language in
a speech community, is a long-term goal and one that takes generations of people who
continue to engage in language activism. It is expected, or at least hoped, that the child
learners will take on the language values of their parents or community activists who set up
learning opportunities for them, and carry on the goals of language revitalization. It may be
hoped that the learners will teach the language themselves, and perhaps bring the language
 Language and Education 311

into their own home. Some language programs specifically target increasing the fluency of
the people who are being hired to teach the language, or teaching parents the language for
use at home (see, e.g., MacLeod n.d.). Language activists may hope that child learners will
grow up to become language teachers, or even fantasize that a learner will marry another
learner of the language in order to raise a generation of native speakers.

Possible influence on the language being learned

In general, second language learners will speak at least somewhat differently than native
speakers. If the learner is still a young child, the differences may be almost unnoticeable
(so long as she/he learns from native speakers in an immersion context), but for adult
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learners, there will be at least an accent. Learners are also likely to have some lexical and
grammatical influence from their native language, and there will perhaps be simplification
of some of the grammatical systems such as loss of some affixes or complex syntactic
structures. Thus, a learner’s talk may have many discernable differences from a native
speaker’s talk, depending on the learner’s language exposure and native talents. However, in
the case of foreign languages, it is hard to imagine a situation in which the learners would
have any influence on the language as it is spoken by the native-speaking community as a
whole.2 The same is true for majority languages, and of immigrant minorities in a country
where one language is dominant.3 This is not the case for endangered languages. If the
language is to survive, it is going to be carried on by the learners themselves, and thence
by their own pupils or children. So, any difference from the native speech that the learner
carries on will become a feature of the language itself in the future. By going through this
bottleneck, the language may be simplified, or pidginized, or gain calques from the first
language, as well as differences in pronunciation, and so on. How the language changes,
and how much it changes, will be a function of how thoroughly the language is learned
during the era of the last native speakers. Whether the change is considered a ‘bad’ thing
or just accepted as an example of the universal fact of language change is a matter of
opinion within the activist community. (See Ramirez 2009 and Holton 2009, for opinions
that massive language change may even be desirable.4)
Another aspect of language change for endangered languages is language
modernization – the development of new vocabulary and genres of speech that are part of
our everyday living. If the language had stopped being used, say 50 years ago, then there
would not be any words for objects and activities that developed in the last half century.
Depending on the nature of the program, it may be that teachers and learners would be
making up new vocabulary themselves. Or else in larger programs such as the Hawaiian im-
mersion school system, a ‘new word’ committee may be set up to handle the vast amount of
vocabulary needed to teach subjects in that language – such as mathematics and chemistry
(see Kimura, The Hawaiian Lexicon Committee, and I.A.G.L. Counceller 2009).
Many Indigenous languages do not have standardized writing systems, so literacy
itself represents a change in the language. Some programs focus entirely on oral compe-
tency, including oral literature – storytelling and song. But in school-based revitalization
programs, where literacy may be a big part of the school program, there are genres of
language use that may never have existed before, such as essay writing and tests. Even
telephone calls might be a new genre of speech, along with texting and other modern
forms of long-distance communication. So, we see that the mere fact of teaching an endan-
gered language in the context of language revitalization may bring a great change to that
language.
 312 L. Hinton

Considerations for teaching

Foreign language teaching and majority language teaching are based on many decades
of research, literature development on language teaching theory and methods, and the
development of massive amounts of materials to assist in language teaching. Heritage
language teaching can also make use of the materials available to the foreign language
classroom, but there are some differences in the needs of heritage language learners.
At this time, there are generations of people who have some knowledge of their heritage
language – either passive competence or even some speaking ability. When taking language
classes at the college level, the heritage learner may be way ahead of the beginners in
terms of understanding and speaking, which might mean that the student should be put
in an intermediate language class, but she/he may have little or no literacy skills, which
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would argue for placing the student in a beginning class. To meet the different needs
of heritage language students, some university campuses are actually designing special
heritage language classes (Sweley 2006).
For endangered languages, there is much less support available for language teaching.
Research on ‘what works’ is just beginning; pedagogical books, reference dictionaries and
culturally appropriate curricula and language teaching materials are few and far between
unless the teachers themselves make them. (In fact, this is just what the teachers of endan-
gered languages do.) The worst problem, however, is the simple lack of native-speaking
teachers. In some cases, there are no speakers at all (which will be discussed further in this
paper). Commonly, the only speakers are the elders nowadays, who are past their retirement
age and are untrained in language teaching. Most revitalization programs must depend
partially or fully on teachers who are themselves second language learners. But how do
they learn the language? College- and community-based adult language learning programs
for endangered languages are rare and often insufficient to develop fluency in the learner.
This is not always true – larger populations with endangered languages have often been
able to develop excellent second language learning programs in the college setting (see,
e.g., Wilson and Kamanā 2001 for a description of the Hawaiian language programs at the
University of Hawaii). But smaller language groups find that they must seek new strategies
for learning and teaching.

New strategies for teaching and learning endangered languages

Since endangered languages frequently have few resources available to them in the way
of adequate pedagogical materials or teachers fully competent in the language, new and
ingenious strategies for language teaching and learning have developed to meet the goals
of language revitalization.

School programs
Schools are an attractive venue for producing new speakers of a language because a
relatively large number of children can learn the language at the same time, at an age when
language acquisition comes most easily and holds most promise for fluency. It is also a
sweet irony to use schools for language revitalization since they have played such a large
role in language death. But language classes in otherwise English-medium schools are not
sufficient to create fluent speakers. Only a serious bilingual education program can raise
fluent speakers. By that, I mean that the endangered language is given at least as much time
and attention as English – or even more, since the children already know conversational
 Language and Education 313

English when they come to school, but may have no ability in the endangered language.
(See McCarty 2003 for a fuller discussion of the benefits of well-run bilingual education
programs for endangered languages.)
The most successful are the ‘language survival schools’, as the Hawaiians call Language
Nests and immersion schools. These have been the most effective means of developing a
large number of new speakers of endangered languages. Through well-run language survival
schools, children learn their language at a young age and can become fully fluent. Beyond
this, education is more under the control of the speech community, which can model their
children’s education more to their own values and culture. The preschool Language Nests,
followed quickly by immersion schools, began in the 1980s, led by the Maoris (1981) and
the Hawaiians (1983; King 2001). Maoris and Hawaiians now have dozens of immersion
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schools and even more Language Nests, giving a Hawaiian-medium or Maori-medium

education through the 12th grade in many places.
To go on with the Hawaiian example, a student can go from preschool to K-12 schooling
in Hawaiian and, if desired, continue on to college at the University of Hawaii and go all
the way to a PhD with most of his classes being taught in Hawaiian (Wilson and Kamanā
2001). Academic English (the children all know conversational English from the general
environment outside of school) is taught in the later grades as a class, like other ‘foreign’
languages. The students do well in school, with a nonexistent dropout rate, and have a very
high rate of going on for higher education, both in Hawaii and elsewhere. The result so far
is several thousands of young fluent speakers.
Other immersion schools include the Akwesasne Freedom School in New York
(Mohawk), the Cutswood School (Blackfeet) in Montana, the Snı̈iiı̈o Salish immersion
preschool and primary school, also in Montana, the Tsunadeloquasdi School (Cherokee)
in Oklahoma, the Niigane Ojibwemowin immersion school (Ojibwe) in Minnesota, the
Faithkeepers School (Seneca) in New York, Chief Atahm School (Secwepemc) in British
Columbia and others. The first ‘Nidos de Lengua’ in Mexico were set up starting in 2008
(Meyer and Soberanes 2009). There are also immersion schools and preschools in Europe
for Saami, Gaelic, Manx and a variety of other languages.

‘Boot-strapping’: adult second language learning of endangered languages

While language immersion is the goal of the language survival schools, full-time immersion
is not feasible for many of them because of insufficient fluency among the staff. For example,
Melissa Borgia writes of the Faithkeepers’ School:
At the present time, immersion teaching accounts for about ten percent of the school’s curricula.
Staff at the school is trying every possible means to get learners to utilize the language and
strengthen the community as a result. (2009, 190–1)
The difficulty with the immersion school movement is the ‘Missing Generation’ – the
paucity of teachers and potential teachers, and parents as well, who can think and speak
in the language. The Language Nest movement was founded with the goal of having the
grandparent generation, the last generation to grow up as native speakers, being the people
caring for the children. But once the children reach school age, professional teachers are
needed. Even in the Language Nests, younger adults are often important for many of the
functions. In most of the immersion schools, many if not all of the professional teachers
are second language learners. Thus, an adult language program is an essential part of
teacher training and preparation. The larger language groups have good college programs
that can help develop fluency in adults. For example, the University of Hawaii at Hilo
 314 L. Hinton

has an excellent Hawaiian Language Program, where six full years of Hawaiian language
courses are offered, all but the first semester in full immersion. But the smaller endangered
languages in areas of more diversity and fewer resources per language are often not able to
develop programs of this caliber. This is where ‘bootstrap strategies’ develop.

Master-Apprentice programs
Compare Hawaii with California, where there are about 50 languages that have a handful of
elderly speakers, and another few dozen languages left with no speakers at all. Not only is
the language situation much more dire for these languages than for Hawaiian, but also the
very diversity of Indigenous languages in California, and the smallness of the population
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of each speech community, make it impossible for universities to have language programs
to teach any, much less all, of them.
To answer this challenge, the nonprofit group Advocates for Indigenous California
Language Survival (AICLS) developed the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program
(MAP). MAP is a rather informal program that can be readily varied according to the
situation. The teams trained by AICLS usually consist of as little as one master (a fluent
speaker) and one apprentice (a dedicated learner), and a mentor to help guide their work
through occasional phone calls and visits. This same model is used in British Columbia
for a MAP program run by the First Peoples’ Heritage, Language and Culture Council
(FPHLCC). For community-run MAP programs that focus on a single language, there
may be many one-on-one teams or there may be variations such as several masters and
apprentices all working together under the guidance of a single mentor (e.g. the Oklahoma’s
Sauk language program). The goal in all the cases is for apprentices to gain conversational
proficiency by spending time immersed in the language with the masters (10–40 hours per
week, depending on the program, or even more if they actually live together). Since there
is no professional teacher of the language, the team is a true partnership between masters
and apprentices, with the apprentice usually actively guiding his own learning process.
The teams receive training in weekend-long workshops, with refresher workshops twice a
year. The training focuses on how to achieve language immersion, planning for activities
they can do together and ways to overcome plateaus. Single-language Master-Apprentice
programs, such as the Sauk program and the Chickasaw program, may have multiple teams
that spend more time together for additional training and problem solving.
There are now many MAP programs throughout the United States and Canada, and
other countries, such as Australia and Brazil, are starting to try out the model as well. There
are a number of characteristics of the Master-Apprentice program that make it suitable
for the unique needs of language revitalization that are listed below (for more on the
Master-Apprentice program, see Hinton 2002):

(1) The concept is simple (though implementation can be hard).

(2) There is no need for books, a classroom, licensed teachers, professionals, or even
a writing system or funding.
(3) It is done in the context of daily life. People can still do what they need to do with
their day, whether it is housework, shopping, planting a garden or hunting – they
just need to do it together, and in the language.
(4) There is a seamless relationship to cultural maintenance and revitalization since
activities involving ceremony and traditions are, like any other activity, part of the
team’s work together.
 Language and Education 315

(5) It can be fun, informal and spontaneous.

(6) It provides oral competency and conversational skills, with grammar being acquired
naturally rather than being studied formally.
(7) It provides a real partnership between generations, thereby providing valuable
contact for isolated older speakers, and has been shown to have a healing power
that overcomes the generational rifts that were one of the results of language loss.
(8) Finally, it also serves as a training tool for teaching, and is used by language revi-
talization programs as a way of increasing the teachers’ fluency (e.g. the Blackfeet
and the Sauk).

Learning a language from documentation

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Many endangered languages are actually ‘dormant’ – no speakers left at all. The only
feasible way for learners to increase their knowledge in those cases would be from docu-
mentation.

Two success stories

Two successful language learners – Jessie Little Doe Baird (Wampanoag) and Daryl Bald-
win (Myaamia) – are living proof that one can revitalize a language from documentation.
There have been no speakers of Myaamia for at least 50 years, and none of Wampanoag
for 150 years. Little Doe and Baldwin followed similar paths in their work – each received
MAs from linguistics departments, Daryl at the University of Montana and Jessie at MIT.
Each worked closely with a linguistic mentor who had knowledge of the language – Jessie
with Ken Hale and Daryl with David Costa. Both Daryl and Jessie have deep familiar-
ity with the old documentation of their languages by missionaries, anthropologists and
linguists, and are working on developing the documentation into user-friendly products,
such as dictionaries, books of narrative texts, etc. Each of them has been able to use the
documentation to learn their language orally, and both have reached high levels of profi-
ciency. They are fluent enough in their respective languages to have made it the language
of their homes, and are each raising their children as native speakers, bilingual in English
and their ancestral tongues. Each are also the leaders of the language revitalization process
in their own communities. Daryl works with the Myaamia people to develop programs
and materials for language and cultural learning. During the academic year, he acts as the
director of the Myaamia Project at Miami University, which conducts research and oversees
classes on Myaamia language, culture and history. Jessie is working with the Wampanoag
people on multiple projects of language and cultural revitalization. In 2010, she received
the MacArthur ‘genius’ Award for her tremendous contributions to language revitalization
(see also Penfield and Tucker 2011).

The Breath of Life Language Workshops

The Breath of Life Language Workshops follow the example of Daryl Baldwin and Jessie
Little Doe. The Breath of Life Language Workshop for California Indians without speakers
is a biennial workshop established in the early 1990s. Every other summer, the University
of California at Berkeley and the AICLS combine forces to offer a week-long gathering
to assist California Indians to learn how to find archival materials on their languages,
learn enough about linguistics to interpret them and discuss methods of utilizing them for
language learning and teaching. About 60 California Indians per year come to the workshop,
 316 L. Hinton

along with 30-some linguistics graduate students and faculty who serve as mentors. ‘Breath
of Life’ has spread to other institutions as well; the University of Oklahoma hosted one in
2010, and there will be a National Breath of Life Archival Institute in Washington, DC, in
2011, to research the materials in the National Anthropological Archives and the Library
of Congress.
There is no literature on the ways to learn how to speak a language using only raw field
notes or other documentation such as old letters, traditional tales or Bible translations. One
thing that is clear, however, is that people trying to use documentation for language learning
must become researchers. If the documentation is only on paper, a researcher/learner must
become an expert in the pronunciation of phonetic writing – and usually not just one
form of phonetic writing, but several, since there are many different variations of the
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phonetic alphabet that have been used over time. Linguistic analysis of the documentation
is essential in order to figure out the grammar well enough to be able to create novel
sentences. In the past, linguists rarely documented everyday conversation, so conversation
has to be essentially reinvented. The effort that it takes for a learner/researcher to actually
become a speaker of the language is multifaceted and vast. And like other learners, the
learner/researcher will also probably become a teacher, holding classes or using the language
with his or her children. Since the process of teaching others will mostly be via very
different processes than the learner/researcher used to learn the language himself/herself,
a great transition has to be made toward using the teaching methods – and often these will
include the immersion methods we have discussed earlier.

CILLDI
The Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI) goes
several steps further than the Breath of Life model by training community linguists through
an intensive summer workshop in linguistics and language pedagogy. Through the insti-
tutionalization of this kind of training for community language activists, larger groups
of people can become proficient in the skills they need for developing effective teaching
strategies for endangered languages.

Family language revitalization

Daryl Baldwin and Jessie Little Doe are two of the increasing number of parents who are
choosing to use their endangered language at home with their children. But parents who
wish to teach their children their ancestral language often have to face the problem of
their own lack of fluency. Frequently, even when parents have learned their language in
immersion schools or college programs, they find that they do not know how to talk about
the various things that families talk about with children. Changing diapers, playing with a
baby and talking to one’s child using affectionate terms are not generally taught in language
classes. Thus, some communities are in the beginning stages of developing parental support
programs. The Myaamiya are focusing much of their work on developing children’s books
and other materials and distributing them directly to families, using technology such as
the Smart Pen (Daryl Baldwin, pers. comm., December 1, 2010). The Chickasaw language
program is considering a modified Master-Apprentice program that pays one parent per
household to be a stay-at-home parent who is simultaneously learning the language from
an elder person and using it with their children (Joshua Hinson, pers. comm., December 1,
2010). In California, the AICLS is developing ways to assist families – Kawaiisu, Karuk,
Tolowa, Pomo, Mutsun and Tachi – trying to learn their languages while also bringing them
 Language and Education 317

into their homes. In Europe, the Welsh Language Board, funded by the National Assembly
of Wales, runs a project for families, ‘Twf ’, with programs for parents to learn Welsh to be
used at home, and support groups for families raising their children with Welsh. Twf is well
connected to the larger health system of Wales, which allows contact with and training of
parents interested about the Welsh language before their child is even born. Their excellent
website (http://www.twfcymru.com) is full of information and advice for families who wish
to raise their children to be bilingual in Welsh and English.
The Scots Gaelic organization Comhairle Nan Sgoiltean Araich (CNSA), now known
as Taic, has also developed a set of language courses and programs for families – the Family
Language Plan, Language in the Home and Bumps and Babies. Like the Welsh Twf, Scots
Gaelic language learners focus on vocabulary, speaking styles and genres of speech that
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they can use directly with their children (MacLeod n.d.). There are also many more families
around the world working on their own to use the language with their children, without
help from community programs.

Conclusion
Most of the strategies and methods of language teaching and learning presented here
are original, creative ‘bootstrap’ ways people have developed as a response to the goals
of and obstacles to language revitalization. Absent from second language pedagogy for
endangered languages, in many cases, are applied linguists who specialize in language
teaching theory and methodology. In general, outside experts who work with communities
on language revitalization are documentary linguists, theoretical linguists and linguistic
anthropologists – most of whom do not have an educational background in language teach-
ing and learning. These experts know a great deal about the structure of the languages, and
are especially helpful in the provision of recorded and written data, and in the development
of reference materials – reference dictionaries and grammars, for example. Some have also
worked to help develop some of the novel language learning models that were discussed
in this paper. But the guidance of experts in language and teaching methods and models
could be of great assistance in language revitalization. Research by applied linguists on
the effectiveness of the new models and how they could be improved would be especially
helpful. But meanwhile, communities, families and individuals are creating new and unique
strategies all the time to bring their endangered languages back into use.

Notes
1. Some heritage languages with a long-standing history in the United States have developed
unique dialects spoken nowhere else. Linguists studying these varieties point out that we must
also recognize the existence of ‘endangered dialects’ (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995).
2. Julia Sallabank (pers. comm.) mentions, however, that there is a current debate about norms for
English as a lingua franca, in response to the fact that there are now more nonnative speakers
than native speakers.
3. In colonized or previously colonized countries, on the other hand, where the colonizing language
is widely spoken, new varieties of the colonizer language may develop. ‘New Englishes’, for
example, abound in the postcolonial world.
4. Heritage languages may behave in a manner somewhat similar to what I have said here about
endangered languages. As mentioned in Note 1, a language that is spoken by a long-standing
immigrant community is likely to exhibit differences from the language as spoken in the home
country, both by the retention of archaisms and by an influence from the majority language, as
well as by just taking a different path of language change from the home country (see Cope
2011). In fact, as these local speech varieties begin to disappear, they too are endangered, and
will change yet in more and different ways in the context of language revitalization.
 318 L. Hinton

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