Trip of the Tongue (13 page)

Crystal told me about her classes, about how she loved when parents called up after hearing their children speak their language for the first time. She also told me about her students and how shy they could be at first, particularly the younger ones.

“How do you handle it?” I asked.

She smiled. “I just tell them, ‘I'm not asking you to be perfect; all I want you to do is try. You can't do anything wrong in here.' ”

Native language instruction in the United States has come a long way from the assimilationist educational policies of men such as Richard Henry Pratt and C. A. Huntington. Today there is a wide range of strategies being utilized to nurture existing languages and preserve the remains of dead and dying ones. There are Head Start programs that focus on early learners and high school courses that are offered as electives. There are schools such as Rough Rock that offer bilingual instruction, and schools such as the P
Å«
nana Leo “language nests” in Hawai'i that offer full Native language immersion. Tribal colleges and other post-secondary institutions provide the opportunity to gain advanced linguistic expertise.

None of this would have been possible without some efforts on the part of the U.S. government. The Native American Languages Act of 1990, for instance, declared that it was “the official policy of the United States government to preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native languages.” While the initial act was mostly something of a symbolic gesture, it was amended in 1992 to include a grant program under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006 further amended the act and authorized three-year grants for Native language nests, survival schools, and restoration programs.

Since 1994, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA) has provided grant money to tribal governments and Native Hawaiian groups for the development of language programs and learning materials. Between 2000 and 2007, the ANA provided $56 million for 254 language preservation projects.

Although government support is a welcome and perhaps even necessary condition for successful language preservation efforts, the future of Native languages also relies on the dedicated efforts of individuals such as Leanne Hinton, the founder of the Breath of Life project in California, or Jessie Little Doe Baird, 2010 MacArthur Fellow and director of the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project. After training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Baird worked to compile a wide range of Wampanoag learning materials—a monumental feat given that Wampanoag has been extinct since the late nineteenth century.

Science, too, is playing its part, as technological advances facilitate not only the preservation of Native languages, but also the acquisition of them. Rosetta Stone, for instance, established a corporate grant program to help develop software for languages such as Mohawk, Inupiaq, and Navajo. You can download an app for your Android phone that will help you learn Caddo; you can use the Cherokee syllabary on your iPad.

Even so, it might not be enough. Linguist Michael Krauss estimated in 1998 that of the 175 indigenous languages still spoken in the United States, 90 percent were at risk of extinction. “The sad irony is,” Krauss writes, “that even as U.S. policy has changed explicitly to recognize and support indigenous languages as a national asset … parents are still abandoning their heritage language in favor of English. This process is occurring at such a rapid rate that we stand to lose more indigenous North American languages in the next 60 years than have been lost since Anglo-European contact.”

Now, there are those who might ask whether this is really so bad. Why
should
these languages be preserved? In the United States, there is absolutely an economic benefit to being fluent in English. You could argue, then, that there is an economic cost to focusing on instruction in any other language. And so, by emphasizing the preservation of these indigenous languages at the expense of English proficiency, we may be further hobbling economically disadvantaged Native communities in order to satisfy the whims of privileged academics or bleeding-heart activists.

You could argue on the other hand, however, that each language is an invaluable resource, that every word is a layered little gem of human history, culture, and cognition. You could argue that the loss of a language is an irrevocable and incalculable loss to all humankind.

Where do I stand on this? Well, I love language. I like to ferret out its surprises and then tuck them away like a flower in a book so that every so often, when I'm overwhelmed by the gross inadequacies of daily life, when someone corrects another person's grammar just to be nasty or I happen to hear Rush Limbaugh express an opinion about women, I can turn back to my collection and exclaim over the mirative or the classificatory verb or the evidential suffix, and remember that the human brain can do extraordinary things. So yes, of course I think languages should be preserved.

I'm not suggesting anything extreme. I'm certainly not recommending that Native access to English instruction be somehow restricted. Admittedly, I don't know of any empirical work that explores the economic, cultural, or psychological benefits of indigenous language preservation and revitalization. But I do consider it a moral imperative to make sure something is done to preserve as much of these languages as possible. Even if you take the Darwinian view and argue that a language that can't survive on its own shouldn't survive you can't pretend that current state of Native languages in the United States is somehow “natural.” These languages are not in danger due solely to the gradual encroachment of a language better suited to our particular time and place. They are in danger at least in part because the U.S. government undertook a systematic campaign to put them there.

Just as there is more than one Native language and one Native culture, so too is there more than one Native experience. The last thing I want to do is imply that suffering at the hands of the government is the sole defining characteristic of that experience. Nevertheless, whichever way you look at it, this country did some seriously bad things that have had some seriously bad ramifications. Here are just a few facts: the life expectancy for men on the Crow reservation is forty-four years, on par with countries such as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. Due without a doubt to the slipshod regulation of uranium mines, teenage Navajo girls are significantly more likely than the average American girl—some say as much as seventeen times more likely—to be stricken with cancer of the reproductive organs. The suicide rate for male American Indians and Alaska Natives ages fifteen to thirty-four is three times higher than the national average.

Is this all the government's fault? No, of course not. But it is definitely mostly the government's fault. Government policy directly limited the ability of Native communities to determine their own linguistic (and non-linguistic) fate. Language preservation can return at least some part of that choice by making sure the resources are available for future revitalization efforts.

Makah elder John Ides put the history of indigenous American languages in stark terms: “
Not
learning a language is also a native experience.” But it is important to remember that this is not the be-all and end-all of Native language in the United States. Throughout the country there are communities of Native peoples, children and elders, linguists and educators, who are fighting to mitigate the effects on their language of generations of systematic and deliberate oppression. The languages of Native America serve as a testament to the fact that sometimes the study, instruction, and preservation of language isn't always a dry and fusty thing. Sometimes it is, in every word and phrase, an expression of hope.

People typically come to Neah Bay for three reasons: to fish, to see the museum, and to hike to Cape Flattery. I don't like boats, and I'd seen the museum, so I figured I'd head out to the cape, the northwesternmost point in the continental United States

Cape Flattery was first sighted by James Cook on March 22, 1788. Cook thought he saw an opening between the cape and a nearby island, “which flattered us with the hopes of finding a harbour.” As he got closer, though, he dismissed his initial judgment, and instead of heading toward what was indeed the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, he and his ship sailed north to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Before he left, he christened the disappointing cape Flattery.

Today, Cape Flattery feels nearly as remote as it must have felt to Captain Cook. To get there, you drive west of Neah Bay, pass the Tribal Center, and then turn onto a gravel road, which takes you to the head of the Cape Flattery trail. The hike to the ocean is only three quarters of a mile, a fairly easy walk down a succession of well-kept paths and cedar boardwalks. It should probably take most people about a half hour, but I found myself lingering as I made my way through the trees, hardly able to decide if I wanted to use my eyes or my camera.

The forest was still and slightly dark, and the sudden, public expanse of the cape crept up on me. One minute I was caught in a private thick of green; the next I was on an outcropping with a crowd of fellow tourists. I was expecting a vast sweep of ocean, but I didn't realize that just half a mile off the cape is Tatoosh Island, the location of John Meares's first meeting with the Makah chief who gave the island its name. The island is soon to be returned to the Makah, I was told. For years it was used by the Coast Guard, but they don't need the lighthouse, not anymore.

There were ships in the distance, too. As I began the hike back uphill, I wondered where they were headed—to Port Angeles, or maybe to Tacoma. Every ship that passes through the Strait of Juan de Fuca passes Cape Flattery, which means that I had stood on the very first point of land that an eastbound vessel would see.

The end of the world, I was reminded, is only a matter of perspective.

Chapter Four

Louisiana: French and Louisiana Creole

The exploration and colonization of the Americas precipitated a rapid decline in indigenous language diversity that continues to this day. However, it also ushered in a new era of European language diversity.

As a result of the fierce competition between European countries for land and resources in the New World—not to mention for the services of skilled navigators—there were from the very first expeditions a variety of languages in what is now the continental United States. Ponce de León brought Spanish to Florida; Verrazzano brought Italian and French to the Atlantic Coast; Henry Hudson brought English and Dutch to the Northeast. Swedish settlers, meanwhile, found their way to Delaware, and the French moved south from their initial positions along the St. Lawrence River.

Although English was the majority language in the colonies from very early on, population growth in nineteenth-century America was not limited to any particular language. As Richard Bailey points out, at the time of the American Revolution, more than a fifth of European Americans spoke a language other than English. By 1800, 17 percent of the population of New York and New Jersey was Dutch and 9 percent of Delaware was Swedish. A full third of Pennsylvania was German.

There was for a long time a popular belief that languages separated from their home countries, like a bud nipped from its stem, ceased to develop. This phenomenon was called colonial lag, and there were many—including, notably, Noah Webster—who argued in particular for its applicability to American English.
^v
But though the colonial languages in the New World might have been isolated from their homelands, these languages were not unaffected by their trip to the New World. Colonial lag is, as linguist David Crystal says, “a considerable oversimplification.” Language, even in isolation, continues to change.

But, more to the point, these languages were not always isolated from
other
languages. So not only do you see borrowings between languages in the early history of the Americas—such as the Dutch words that are still spoken in New York City, or the Algonquin vocabulary we use for plants, animals, and places—you also see entirely new language varieties. By this I mean the contact languages known as jargons, pidgins, and creoles.

The Dutch in New Netherland, for instance, developed a simplified version of the Unami language (known as Delaware Jargon) that they later taught to Swedish and English settlers. Various forms of Trader Navajo allowed English-speakers to engage in commerce on Navajo lands. In the Pacific Northwest, an estimated 100,000 speakers of more than 100 different languages at one point spoke Chinook Jargon, which borrowed words from local indigenous languages, English, French, and even Cree and Hawaiian. In the southeast, Mobilian Jargon, a pidgin based on Muskoegean languages, was the local lingua franca.

Given the maelstrom of language interaction that characterized the New World colonies, it is easier than it should be to overlook influences neither Native nor European. But as any student of early American history knows, population growth in the Americas was not due solely to European colonization. It was also fueled by the importation of African slaves. And the languages these slaves brought with them had their own lasting impact on the linguistic topography of the Americas.

These are the languages that I want to explore next—the languages that provide a glimpse into the history and experience of Africans in America.

When I first began thinking about African language in America, I was initially drawn to obscure, isolated tongues. I made plans to visit Brackettville, Texas, the home to a small community of Afro-Seminole-Creole-speakers, and I thought about going to Nantucket, where I might learn about Cape Verdean Creole. At that point I was still more interested in peculiarities than in universals, in the sorts of destinations that might pique the interest of New York's more jaded travel editors. This is why I almost didn't go to Louisiana.

There I was, flitting about the country collecting grammars and vocabulary and piles and piles of informational brochures from, frankly, some of the least exciting tourist destinations I could find, yet I seriously thought about skipping right over Louisiana, the home of zydeco, crawfish, and the go-cup. It just seemed like such an obvious destination, no more creative than name-checking
Citizen Kane
on a list of best-ever movies or saying that if I could have dinner with anyone in the world, dead or alive, I'd choose Jesus.

My initial hesitation also stemmed in part from my ideas about what kind of language could be found in Louisiana. French is the first language I ever studied, beginning all the way back in 1986, when I was still figuring out how to tie my shoes and get my underwear on without falling over. The languages I studied later in life proved to be slippery little bastards, secreting themselves just out of cognitive reach the moment I turned my attention to anything else. As soon as I started Chinese, I forgot Greek; as soon as I dove into Italian, I forgot Chinese. Once I began taking Spanish lessons, everything else was shit out of luck.

Except for French. It's been more than ten years since I have spoken or read French in anything but the most desultory manner, but my stodgy textbook French will be damned if it's going anywhere. While I struggle to say much in Chinese beyond
, I can still remember all seven words in French that end in
-ou
and take
-x
in the plural.
^w
I can't say if it sticks because I started learning it while in a critical period of development, because I studied it for so long, or because it was my first attempt at a second language. Maybe I am, despite my assertions to the contrary, just a bit of a Francophile. But whatever the reason, bits of French have been in my brain for long enough that it has long since ceased to seem at all exotic to me.

What's more, I grew up in a city whose French roots are, 364 days a year, in evidence in the most mundane manner possible: in the flat, midwestern pronunciations of French place names. St. Louis is littered with French—DeSoto, Laclede, Bellerive, Lafayette, Soulard, Gravois—but you'd probably never know it to hear it. Only on Mardi Gras does the city suddenly remember its seventeenth-century affiliations, at which point St. Louisans spontaneously rediscover a recognizable pronunciation for five very important words:
laisser les bon temps rouler
.

All in all, I just didn't think French was that interesting. Why, I thought, would I go out of my way to get somewhere not so very different from where I grew up to learn about a language I've had in my head since Ronald Reagan was president?

Tellingly, I had not stopped to think that the French of Louisiana might be any different from the French of my elementary school. At that point it still hadn't occurred to me that the notion of a singular Louisiana French might be a grotesque oversimplification—much less that any of these varieties of French might have anything to do with the African diaspora. These things wouldn't happen until much later, until I made my way to places such as Vacherie and Lafayette and Natchitoches.

How, then, did I end up in Louisiana? Did I have a change of heart? Did I stumble on some previously undiscovered language primer? Was it just on the way from Miami to Montana? No, I ended up in Louisiana pretty much because I really wanted to go to New Orleans. (I read a bunch of Anne Rice as a kid. Sue me.) Once I got there, however, I realized that the history of French in Louisiana is far more complex than I'd originally thought, and my quick jaunt to New Orleans became a more thoughtful journey through the prairies and bayous of Louisiana.

In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and the French Mississippi Company decided to found a city. They had no residents, no structures, and no exact location, but they did have a name: La Nouvelle-Orléans, an opportunistic choice intended to honor the French regent, the Duke of Orléans. Once they settled on a location, they began by building an eleven-by-seven-block district next to the Mississippi River. Today this area is known as the Vieux Carré (literally, “old square”) or, more familiarly, the French Quarter, and in addition to being the oldest section of New Orleans it is arguably the most famous. It is in the French Quarter that you will find Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral, Antoine's and Café du Monde. And each year during Mardi Gras, it is the French Quarter that hosts much of the outsized revelry the city is so famous for.

Though the French Quarter has always been the oldest part of New Orleans, it has not always been the most well favored. Over the years the French Quarter has had, to put it mildly, some ups and downs. First there were fires. The Good Friday fire of 1788 destroyed 856 of the city's 1,100 buildings; six years later another fire destroyed 212 more. But after each fire, the residents rebuilt. And, in fact, some of the precautions taken against future fires—reliance on materials such as stucco and brick, close-set buildings with shared firewalls—have contributed to the quarter's unique architectural character.

Then there were bureaucrats. In 1836, in an attempt to deal with the problem of rising tensions between the city's Anglo and French populations, the city government divided the city into three autonomous districts.
^x
As historian Carl Brasseaux has pointed out, this isolation did not serve the French Quarter well. The reduced tax base resulted in a reduction of government services, and over the next forty years the area—and its language—fell into decline. “By the end of Reconstruction,” he writes, “the French Quarter was a glorified slum.” But, again, there was a sad sort of silver lining to this cloud. Because residents of the area couldn't afford to replace the eighteenth-century construction with more-modern structures, the French Quarter was able to retain what we now think of as its historic charm.

Today the French Quarter is, in parts, spectacularly picturesque, with creeping wisteria, eighteenth-century Spanish-influenced architecture, and a sense that at any moment Blanche DuBois might come floating around the corner. In other parts, though, like so many major tourist attractions, it's a big, smelly armpit of a place. Bourbon Street is particularly awful, full of roving bands of drunken tourists and shops full of cheap plastic crap. Mardi Gras beads seem to be constantly underfoot, like those last bits of sand you can never get out of the crotch of your bathing suit. It's like the worst parts of the Vegas Strip, only fatter.
^y

But if you're looking for some lingering signs of French, you'll find them here. Though French hasn't been the majority language in New Orleans for many decades—indeed, today more residents speak Vietnamese than French—its influence is everywhere in New Orleans and most particularly on the streets of the Vieux Carré.

Most of the French I came across was my favorite kind of French: culinary French. Consider, for instance, trout meunière, trout dredged in flour and served with a lemon and brown butter sauce. The name here comes from the French for “miller's wife,” a nod to the preparation's rustic simplicity—and, presumably, dependence on flour. At Galatoire's on Bourbon Street, trout meunière amandine—almond-encrusted trout meunière—is the single most popular entrée.

Then there's
pain perdu
, or “lost bread,” which fans of cable food shows know is a fancy term for French toast and a great way to use up old bread.
Étouffée
comes from the French for “suffocated” or “smothered” and is most frequently seen in the company of the words
crawfish
,
rice
, and
roux
.
Beignet
, French for “fritter,” is the name of the official state donut of Louisiana.
^z
For such a delicious treat, its etymology is surprisingly unappetizing: from what I can tell,
beignet
can be traced back to the same French word that gave us
bunion
.

Once I ventured outside the kitchen, however, I started to notice that many of the French-inspired phrases I stumbled on in New Orleans felt decidedly awkward. Take the phrase “make dodo.” Derived from the French
faire
(“make”) and
dormir
(“to sleep”), “make dodo” is used—as is
faire dodo
in Quebec and France—to tell young children to go to sleep. (In Cajun country,
fais dodo
is instead used as a name for the dances thrown once said children are safely in bed.) This literal borrowing of the meaning of
faire
also shows up in phrases like “make ménage” (“clean the house”) and “make groceries” (“go grocery shopping”).

And as in St. Louis, French has granted New Orleans the dubious gift of unpredictable pronunciation. Sometimes words of French origin will have French pronunciation:
praline
, for instance, is pronounced “PRAH-line”;
gout
(“taste”) is pronounced “goo.” But other times the pronunciation will be Americanized:
Decatur
is “duh-KAY-ter”;
Fontainebleau
is “fountain blue.” And then there are the pronunciations that I much suspect were made up solely to confound outsiders. Why else would you accent the second syllable of
Burgundy
? Or pronounce
Burthe
“byooth”?