"Dena'ina elder Sasha Lindgren went to the board in Room 158 at Kenai Peninsula College recently and wrote: bee bop a lula sh'a'a qelan (she's my baby). Our Dena'ina class was translating modern lyrics as an exercise in understanding the language. Others followed with the Dena'ina equivalent of "I go out walkin' after midnight," and other golden oldies.

The students and I are focusing on the Kenai dialect of Dena'ina. If we could, we'd learn it from elders in monthlong immersion sessions. But the last Kenai dialect speaker, the Rev. Fred Mamaloff, died four years ago so that's not an option. We use dictionaries and grammar derived from linguists like James Kari and the writings of Peter Kalifornsky. Slowly we build a sentence in what is one of the most complex languages in the world. It's harder than differential calculus.

And why? Why not let cultural evolution take its course and let the language die its slow, painful death?

Revitalizing the indigenous languages of place is one of the critical tasks of our time, and Alaska can be at the forefront of this effort. Former Alaska Humanities Forum director Gary Holthaus once testified at a statewide curriculum conference that the two most important resources of Alaska are its remarkable landscape and Native language heritage. Those subjects, in all their manifestations, should be the core of our northern curriculums from grade school to college."

Get the Story:
Alan Boraas; As languages die, we lose diversity of thought (The Anchorage Daily News 4/17)