Unlike many New Yorkers who are just now losing their native inflections, much of the state's Indian population hasn't had a mother tongue for centuries. Shinnecock and Unkechaug are two extinct Long Island languages that tribal leaders and academics want to bring back to life, the Times reports. Ultimately they'd like Native American kids to start learning the languages in school: “When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” said Chief Harry Wallace, elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”
The Long Island efforts—supported by linguists at Stony Brook University—are part of a nationwide language reclamation movement among Native Americans, who have lost all but 175 of the 300 languages once spoken in the country. Because each tribe must piece its language together on paper before ever speaking it, many fail. Still, a dormant language of the Miami Nation was partially revived and, unrelated to Native Americans, modern Hebrew is an example of a dead language successfully resurrected.
The Unkechaug project will rely heavily on a word list recorded by Thomas Jefferson (excerpt here) during a 1791 visit (even at the time he said that only three women could speak the language fluently), as well as deeds, legal papers and religious documents and anything else experts can get their hands on. “When we have an idea of what the language should sound like, the vocabulary and the structure, we’ll then introduce it to people in the community,” said Robert Hoberman, chairman of linguistics at Stony Brook. Even then it's almost certain they'll sound like foreigners. “Would someone from 200 years ago think we had a funny accent?” Mr. Hoberman asked. “Yes. Would they understand it? I hope so.”
