Indigenous language
[6] Overall findings show that "19% of the world's living languages are no longer being learned by children,"[6] which is a leading cause of lingual extinction.
That includes languages originally spoken in the region, as well as those of Native American tribes from other areas that were forcibly relocated onto reservations there.
Then, government boarding schools severely punished American Indian students who were overheard speaking their own language.
To avoid beatings and other punishments, Yuchi and other Indian children abandoned their native languages in favor of English.
These remaining speakers spoke Yuchi fluently before they went to school and have maintained the language despite strong pressure to abandon it.
In the Northwest Pacific plateau, there are no speakers left of the indigenous tribal languages from that area all the way to British Columbia.
[10] Reasons for these declines can be attributed to the spread of diseases, such as the measles and smallpox epidemics, forced displacement of inhabitants by settlers, and social, political, and economic isolation and exclusion.
They gather at "pow-wow" to share culture, stories, remedies, dances, music, rhythms, recipes and heritage with anyone who wants to learn them.
In January 2008, in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to 89 year old Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community.
Hundreds of indigenous languages around the world are taught by traditional means, including vocabulary, grammar, readings, and recordings.
[16] About 6,000 others can be learned to some extent by listening to recordings made for other purposes, such as religious texts for which translations are available in more widely-known languages.
Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.
States shall take effective measures to ensure that State-owned media duly reflect indigenous cultural diversity.
Local indigenous communities have also made efforts to create indigenous-focused pedagogical programs and combat English monolingualism in schools.
Similar efforts were made in Kamchatka, Russia, where indigenous peoples of the region fought for the preservation of the Itelmen language.
[21] After receiving a three-year grant from Title VII's Bilingual Education Act, Yamamoto managed to establish an orthography, a dictionary, and teaching materials in the Hualapai language.
[21] The program coordinators sought input from Hualapai parents and elders to evaluate the developed curriculum and educational objectives, among other things.
The organization's efforts have advanced the development and growth of programs focused on Native American languages and their speakers, both at the local and national levels.
And the word treasure also evoked the notion of something belonging exclusively to the Rama people, who now attributed it real value and had become eager and proud of being able to show it to others.
