IU linguists involved in preservation of Lakota language

Wil Meya of the AISRI staff is director of the recently formed Lakota Language Consortium (LLC). AISRI is the lead agency in creating the LLC from among 38 school systems that teach some 18,000 Lakota students. Meetings have been held with school board members, superintendents, principals and Lakota studies teachers from the majority of schools on the Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock and Rosebud reservations in the Dakotas.

“Everyone involved has expressed a strong commitment to the consortium concept as the best way to revive the Lakota language,” explained Meya, who lived on the Pine Ridge reservation for several years. The major LLC goal is to standardize Lakota language instruction, curriculum and resource materials to provide the necessary long-term technical, social and financial structure needed to revitalize the Lakota language.

“Lakota speakers of the last fluent generation are becoming elders, and no realistic grassroots effort had emerged to direct the language recovery until the LLC was created,” said Ray DeMallie, AISRI director and a leading Lakota scholar. DeMallie, an anthropologist, has studied the Lakotas for more than 30 years. He said the number of Lakota speakers is rapidly diminishing, and current estimates show that within 10 years or less, 90 percent of the population at Pine Ridge will be unable to speak Lakota unless the trend is reversed. He emphasized that if the language were lost, the culture of the Lakotas would be lost as well.

“When the language is lost, many of the cultural elements are lost, such as its greetings, praises, laws, literature, songs, riddles, proverbs, cures, wisdom and prayers. A culture can’t be expressed and passed on in any other way,” he said.

DeMallie and Meya said IU is a logical choice to administer the consortium in the developmental stage. AISRI is a leader in American Indian language documentation, instruction and revitalization. It also is an international leader in developing sophisticated computer software to support its language programs with numerous American Indian projects throughout the United States. In addition to the leadership of DeMallie and the involvement of Meya, Douglas Parks, associate director of AISRI and editor of the journal Anthropological Linguistics, is a linguist with 35 years of experience in working with Plains languages. He is now compiling a dialect dictionary of the Sioux (Dakota/Lakota) languages.

http://www.indiana.edu/~aisri

http://www.lakotalanguage.org