The Sleeping Languages of America: How Tribal Nations Are Reviving Tongues Once Declared Dead

When I first heard Wampanoag spoken out loud, it was by a young child. Standing in a community center north of Cape Cod, the seven-year-old was making fun of her younger brother over something involving a sandwich. For more than a century, there were no living speakers of the language. A young girl was now using it to irritate her sibling. That has a quality that is both almost comical and simultaneously catches your throat.

Linguists used an odd term for languages similar to hers for a very long time. They referred to them as “sleeping.” The difference is more important than it might seem. Dead suggests a coffin, a conclusion, something you mourn and let go of. Sleeping also implies that the words are waiting for someone who is patient enough to wake them up, whether they are buried in court depositions from the 1600s or recorded in ancient missionary journals. Tribal nations have made the decision to do just that throughout the United States.

The figures are cruel. Nearly 300 different languages existed in what is now America prior to the arrival of Europeans, many of which were as dissimilar from one another as English and Mandarin. Most of them were taken care of by boarding schools, forced assimilation, and outright prohibitions. Fluent speakers of dozens of these languages could congregate in one room by the 1970s. Although it’s still unclear if some can ever be fully restored, the endeavor itself appears to be having an unanticipated effect on the communities making the effort.

The Myaamia people of Oklahoma present a compelling argument. When the last fluent speaker died in the 1960s, their language became silent. For many years, it was limited to field notes made by a Smithsonian linguist who had documented elders in the early 1900s. Then, in the 1990s, Daryl Baldwin, a young man from Myaamia, took those notes and made the decision that his kids would speak them as they grew up. They did. He currently oversees a center at Ohio’s Miami University. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that, over the course of thirty years, the language did not return on its own; songs, games, and a sense of community that researchers are currently examining as a public health intervention also returned.

I’m most interested in the final section. Israeli-Australian linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann, who has spent years working with Aboriginal communities, contends that language revival improves mental health and reduces suicide rates in colonized communities. Even though the data is still inconsistent and detractors point out that correlation does not imply causation, the pattern persists. It appears that communities that regain their language also regain other things.

Not all projects are successful. Some stall due to a lack of funding, some fall apart when an important elder passes away before their knowledge can be passed on, and some become entangled in internal disputes over which dialect is considered authoritative. Even with one of the nation’s best-funded programs, the Cherokee Nation still has trouble producing enough young, fluent speakers to replace the elders it loses every year. Different types of investors, such as philanthropic foundations and federal grants, are paying attention, but the rate of loss has not decreased as quickly as anticipated.

Walking through these communities gives one the impression that something much more than grammar is being fixed. A grandmother from New Mexico told me that when her grandson asked her what the Tewa word for “morning” was, she realized it had been fifty years since she had been asked. Just to hear it, she said it twice. She then put it in writing for him. It’s no longer sleep, whatever you want to call it.