Previous Story
‘Usage is key to survival of native languages’
|
Posted on Sep 20 2011
By Clarissa V. David
Reporter
Reporter
Barbara Dewein, a PhD candidate in linguistics from the Universitat Bremen in Germany, said that continued use of the Chamorro language is key to its preservation.
“It’s people’s choice to speak the language or not and people might have good reasons to speak English instead of Chamorro but if they want to preserve Chamorro, there’s no other choice than speaking it and giving it on, passing it on to the next generations,” Dewein told Saipan Tribune.
Dewein and Dr. Thomas Stolz, who are part of a five-member team working on the Chamorrica project, discussed their project’s initial findings in a presentation at the American Memorial Park Visitors Center Theater on Sept. 17, sponsored by the NMI Humanities Council.
Dewein noted that efforts to perpetuate the language “should come from all” and not just the elders or the younger members of the Chamorro populace.
People’s attitude, however, could pose as a big challenge to such efforts, according to Dewein who has had the same personal experience in her home dialect in the middle part of Germany. “I thought it was uncool to speak it because everyone said it’s uncool.”
Dewein also pointed out the importance of providing a setting that encourages those who are trying to learn the Chamorro language.
“Even if they’re not correct in anything they say, they shouldn’t be dismissed for it. They should be encouraged. There needs to be a surrounding in a way in which people feel that it makes sense to speak Chamorro,” she said.
Stolz said that their project team is “perhaps the first who tried to help the [Chamorro] speech community by focusing on historical material” since most professional linguists are involved in language endangerment measures and are focused on the current state of the language.
“Of course, they want to protect the language and save it for the future. They concentrate on working with the contemporary speakers. But perhaps for languages whose speakers are interested in reviving the language, the past is as interesting as the present,” said Stolz.
The Chamorrica project started last year and is funded by the German Science Foundation.
