Alaskans speak out to save dying languages : After years of suppression, many have abandoned their native tongues. Now some seek a renewal.

When Nora Dauenhauer was a young girl nearly half a century ago, she made the mistake one day of speaking in her native tongue. As a Tlingit Indian, she had been warned by her teachers not to use the language that had served her people in southeast Alaska for hundreds of years.

When she slipped, retribution was quick and to the point.

“They washed my mouth out with soap,” she said as she discussed the social attitudes that have doomed her language.

The harassment from educators and her peers was so severe that, when her own children were growing up, she hesitated to speak with them in Tlingit. Many years later, she concluded that she had made a mistake, and she dedicated her life to teaching others to speak the guttural sounds that make up the Tlingit language.

But she knows now she is probably too late.

Only two of the 20 native languages that once flourished across Alaska are viable today. Tlingit is not one of them.

“In order for a language to survive, it has to remain a spoken phenomenon,” said Nora’s husband, Richard, a linguist. They work together as part of a cultural heritage program sponsored by Sealaska Corp., one of 13 regional native corporations established by the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act.

Their goal is to preserve as much of the Tlingit language as possible. They are compiling dictionaries and storybooks in Tlingit and other dying languages in Alaska, but they know they are fighting almost impossible odds.

“There will be a record of it,” said Richard Dauenhauer. “But that doesn’t keep the language alive.”

What killed it, he said, is three generations of suppression that turned the Tlingits against their own language. Schoolchildren who spoke “native,” he said, were treated as ignorant barbarians.

“You were backward if you spoke Tlingit,” Nora Dauenhauer said. As a result, there is not a single woman of childbearing age who speaks Tlingit today, so no children are being taught the language in the home.

The Dauenhauers are struggling to educate public school teachers to encourage rather than harass children who want to learn their own language. Tlingit is a difficult language, with two dozen to three dozen sounds that do not exist in English, and there is no obvious reason why children should try.

“There is no marketplace,” Richard Dauenhauer said. To learn it, he said, has to be “a spiritual kind of thing.”

Nora Dauenhauer said it is more than worth the effort, and she sees some encouraging signs in the few children she knows who want to learn it.

“There is a trend toward feeling good about yourself just by being Tlingit,” she said. “Before, we wanted to be just like you. But that doesn’t work for us, because we are Tlingits.”

When she speaks Tlingit, she said, “I have a feeling that this is me, this is what I’m about.”

For coming generations, she says, that experience will almost certainly be lost.

Only two of the five Eskimo languages--and none of the 15 Indian languages--survive in Alaska. Both are forms of Yupik. Siberian Yupik is still spoken on St. Lawrence Island, a desolate chunk of rock that is closer to Russia than the coast of Alaska and is so remote that the native language has not been destroyed by competition with English. And the western part of the state near Bethel has enough isolated villages that Yupik has survived.

Michael Krauss of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks has worked for more than three decades to help save the two surviving Eskimo languages, but he has encountered the same difficulties cited by the Dauenhauers.

The policy among government agencies, public schools and most missionaries, “was to make schoolchildren speak nothing but English and forget their barbarous jargon,” Krauss said. When he first joined the staff of the university in 1960, Krauss took a deep interest in the dying languages and vowed to try to turn the tide.

Krauss and others established an “underground” network to encourage the preservation of the languages, translating stories into native tongues and sending copies to the Alaskan bush. They emerged from the underground in the late 1960s with the passage of the Federal Bilingual Education Act, which permitted readings in languages other than English in public schools.

The law, aimed mainly at Latinos, also meant Yupik Eskimos had finally achieved the “human right” to use their own language.

But he fears that may have been too little, and too late. Yupik is fading even in the remote villages as more youngsters lean toward English.

“In three-quarters of the Yupik villages, the children are no longer learning their own language,” Krauss said, adding that “if Yupik dies out in Alaska, it’s gone,” because it is not spoken anywhere else.

And that, Krauss says, is a tragedy.