[LINK] "Young members of Louisiana’s Houma Nation try to reclaim tribe’s lost language"

[rfmcdonald]

Earlier this week I linked to an article describing how the Houma, an indigenous people of coastal Louisiana, were seeing their homeland wash away. I've more recently come across a Washington Post article are trying to revive their moribund language.

The challenges are steep: There are few available recordings and texts of the language and only a few dozen words are known, largely because of a Smithsonian anthropologist who interviewed native speakers in 1907.

The fate of the Houma language is not unique. Linguists say that the rate of language extinction is accelerating and that by the next century, nearly half of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today — like the Houma, mainly spoken by small tribes in remote places — will probably disappear because of cultural assimilation and globalization. The loss will be profound, says Irina Shport, an assistant professor of language acquisition at Louisiana State University in Lafayette.

[. . .]

The starting point was a single recording made in the early 1970s by Elvira Molinere Billiot, the great-grandmother of [activist Colleen] Billiot, a Georgetown University graduate who grew up in St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans. Her father’s distant cousin found the cassette recording and gave it to Billiot, who upon moving back home had already expressed a strong interest in learning more about her Houma ancestry. The recording was made by Mennonite missionary Greg Bowman, who was conducting research about the Houmas to help them achieve federal recognition. It features the elder Billiot singing “Chan-Chuba,” a simple children’s song that some believe is about chasing an alligator out of the house.

Earlier, at a Houma tribal council meeting outside Lafayette, Billiot met Dardar. The two women realized they shared an interest in researching their tribal roots but didn’t know where to start. When they listened to the elderly woman sing the strange melody, in a language they did not understand, they knew it presented an opening to their project.

“I was getting teary-eyed listening to a voice I was related to, but who died before I was born. It was surreal,” says Billiot, who now lives in Northern Virginia and works in government. “We knew there was something to be preserved, something we should care about, that we should at least try to find more about as Houma. We finally had something to go off of and we got exited.”