Highly Motivated Speakers

Many of the language revitalization movements were initiated and championed by “language icons,” that is, highly motivated and dedicated individual speakers.

Larry Kimura is referred to as the grandfather of the Hawaiian revival movement. He publicized the use of Hawaiian via radio broadcasts back in the 1960s when Hawaiian was no longer used in daily communication. The crucial turning point for the revival of Hawaiian, however, was the establishment of formal schooling structures with Hawaiian as the medium of instruction in the mid-1970s (Brenzinger & Heinrich, Reference Brenzinger and Heinrich2013).

Eleonora Rigby (alias Miss Nora) brought back Rama as a community language in Nicaragua. She launched a “one-person revitalization programme” (Grinevald & Pivot, Reference Grinevald, Pivot, Jones and Ogilvie2013, p. 187) in the 1980s and continued to dedicate her life to the revitalization of the language until her death in 2001. Being nonliterate, she nevertheless considered her involvement in the formal teaching of the language as crucial for the survival of Rama (Grinevald & Pivot, Reference Grinevald, Pivot, Jones and Ogilvie2013).

Fija Bairon ran his own radio program in Uchinaguchi for many years and contributed significantly to the revival of this Ryukyuan language spoken on the Okinawan island of Japan. He produced teach-yourself YouTube videos for the language and taught Uchinaguchi language courses at universities in Japan, Hawai'i, and Germany (Bairon et al., Reference Bairon, Brenzinger and Heinrich2009).

In Southern Africa, the late David Naudé and Bothas Marinda taught the Khwe orthography in community workshops in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa from the mid-1990s onward. The two then-young men were pivotal in fostering the use of Khwe and in spreading literacy among community members, and Bothas also produced some Khwe reading materials (Ociepka & Marinda, Reference Ociepka and Marinda2009). Writing their language became important in empowering the Khwe people to counter the negative stereotypes that they were subjected to and that many of them had come to accept. The ability not only to speak but also to write Khwe is perceived by the Khwe as being crucial in overcoming their low self-esteem. Despite severe poverty, hunger, political discrimination, and social marginalization that the community faces, John Mbeleko, one of the community members, has been teaching Khwe literacy skills to children for the last 20 years (Brenzinger, Reference Brenzinger, Sarvasy and Forker2018, p. 50).

Katrina Esau, alias Ouma Geelmeid/Queen Katrina, aged 85 (at the time of this writing), has dedicated her life to the teaching of Nǀuu / Nǁng. With four remaining elderly speakers, Nǀuu, the last of the Indigenous Click languages once spoken by the former hunter-gatherers of South Africa, is on the verge of extinction. Everyday conversations in Nǀuu stopped more than half a century ago, but due to Katrina's deep desire and firm devotion to the maintenance of her mother tongue, she became the protagonist of the Nǀuu language revival movement. For the last two decades, she has been teaching Nǀuu to children from the neighborhood in her makeshift school, assisted by her granddaughter, Claudia du Plessis, and in more recent years, by David van Wyk (Shah & Brenzinger, Reference Shah, Brenzinger, Jones and Mooney2017).

The above-mentioned “guardians” of languages (see Coulmas, Reference Coulmas2016) are considered to be the “best” speakers of their ancestral languages and, in some cases, are even granted the authority to define the standard variety of a language, which is then taught in schools. Different types of speakers, such as semispeakers, (re-)learners, and second language speakers, can also play important roles in the teaching of ancestral languages. Bradley van Sitters, for example, one of the leading figures of the Khoisan revivalist movement in Cape Town and a second language speaker of his ancestral language, has been teaching Khoekhoegowab since 2014 (Brown & Deumert, Reference Brown and Deumert2017).

Language Documentation and Teaching Materials

Language data in archives and academic publications (i.e., grammars, dictionaries and text corpora of different genres) are crucial resources in the development of teaching materials for moribund languages, especially when there are few or no fully competent speakers remaining who can be involved in the process or at least consulted.

In 1893, when the Hawaiian Kingdom was incorporated by the United States, all Hawaiians were fluent in the indigenous language. The ban on Hawaiian-medium education by the United States in 1896 marked the beginning of the decline of Hawaiian, and by the 1940s, Hawaiian had ceased to be the medium of natural conversations on the islands. The Hawaiian language revival movement, which began in the 1970s, benefitted from the central role that the Hawaiian language played in the kingdom.

Comprehensive language corpora such as those for Hawaiian and Hebrew are rare, and archived language data for endangered languages is generally rather limited. This is even more the case on the African continent where language documentation conducted by missionaries, explorers, colonialists, and (later) linguists began only a few hundred years ago. Most of the 2,000+ African languages are not used as official media of instruction in formal education; nevertheless, they remain vital oral media of communication of communities.

Many of the 300–400 severely endangered African languages spoken by small communities are no longer acquired naturally through intergenerational language transmission; in these cases, language teaching becomes the main mode of language acquisition. Triggered by initiatives of UNESCO and other organizations, increasing numbers of ethnolinguistic minorities are demanding recognition and the teaching of their languages. First steps in such endeavors are the development of community orthographies for previously unwritten languages and these initiatives require the support and input from linguists, for example, in establishing the sound inventory of languages (Jones & Mooney, Reference Jones and Mooney2017).

On request by ǂKhomani community members, alphabet charts, language posters, and a Nǀuu reader (Shah & Brenzinger, Reference Shah and Brenzinger2016) were produced by members of the Centre for African Language Diversity (CALDi) at the University of Cape Town. Results from extensive research by several scholars have been published over the past 20 years, but very few of these language recordings and documents are in a format that is accessible to community members. These studies, however, formed the basis for the development of Nǀuu language teaching materials. Since Katrina is the last mother tongue speaker of Nǀuu teaching her language, the aforementioned educational materials were based on her idiolect and tailor-made for her teaching needs (Shah & Brenzinger, Reference Shah, Brenzinger, Jones and Mooney2017).

Transmission of Threatened Languages

While mother tongues generally continue to be acquired in the home domain through intergenerational language transmission, threatened languages are increasingly learned as additional languages through teaching.

Despite the fact that Akie was described as being on the verge of extinction almost a century ago (Maguire, 1928/Reference Maguire1948, p. 10), this language, spoken by hunter-gatherers in the Maasai plains of Tanzania, continues to be the community language of about 300 members. The maintenance of Akie as the community's language relies to a large extent on a close relationship of the speakers with their deceased relatives, who can interfere in all aspects of their lives, including causing diseases or even death. This truly vital communication with ancestors can only be conducted in Akie, which is the main motivation for the community members to continue to speak their ancestral language. Akie is acquired by children naturally in their home environment and within the community without formal or informal language teaching (König, Heine, & Legère, Reference König, Heine and Legère2017; Heine et al., Reference Heine, König, Legère, Pütz and Filipović2016).

By contrast, Nǀuu was abandoned by most members of the ǂKhomani community when the last speakers were forced to shift to Afrikaans as their new mother tongue some 70 years ago. Many of the hunter-gatherer communities of Southern Africa were wiped out by commandos in a genocide in the second half of the 19th century (De Prada-Samper, Reference De Prada-Samper2012, p. 186). The remaining communities were forced into linguistic and cultural assimilation. Katrina Esau recalled that farmers no longer allowed their workers to use Nǀuu on their farms, and for that reason, she did not speak her ancestral language for most of her life (personal communication, January 2015). In communicating with the other remaining speakers, Katrina regained competence in Nǀuu. Today, the only way to learn Nǀuu is through the extracurricular language classes that are offered by Katrina on her premises. While the language maintenance activities receive substantial backing from the community, outside support from the government would be essential for the establishment of viable and sustainable language teaching structures.

Hawaiian-medium schools are at the core of the Hawaiian revival movement, and formal educational structures have been established up to tertiary level; even doctoral dissertations can be written and defended in Hawaiian (Brenzinger & Heinrich, Reference Brenzinger and Heinrich2013). According to Fishman (Reference Fishman1991), schools can play only a limited role, if any, in the revival and revitalization of ancestral languages. He emphasized that “without intergenerational mother tongue transmission . . . no language maintenance is possible. That which is not transmitted cannot be maintained” (Fishman, Reference Fishman1991, p. 113). However, the revival of Hawaiian demonstrates that language teaching in fact can be the main means of regaining language competence in an ancestral language by a community. Hawaiian is acquired in schools through formal education and spreads from there into other domains, including homes. Wilson and Kamanā (Reference Wilson and Kamanā2009, p. 371), founders of the revival movement, argued that for the reintroduction of a lost language, “the logical place to begin . . . is the school.” The development of high-quality and relevant educational materials, as well as enthusiastic teachers, is at the core of the success of the movement. Graduates of the Hawaiian-medium schools benefit from a sympathetic cultural environment in the state of Hawai'i and the deep appreciation among most Hawaiians for their ancestral language. The excellent reputation of the Hawaiian-medium schools with its solid teaching and high standards provides job opportunities to the graduates; in addition, jobs in many sectors increasingly require competence in Hawaiian. The formal teaching of the language over the last 40 years has produced thousands of new Hawaiian mother-tongue speakers. In the long run, however, sustainability in the use of the Hawaiian ancestral language requires its use in the home and other domains (Brenzinger & Heinrich, Reference Brenzinger and Heinrich2013).