When it comes to language restoration, play does the real work.
How do we effectively restore endangered languages?
According to Beth Piatote (chair of the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization program at University of California, Berkeley), the answer is language play, or the act of experimenting with language for fun. Piatote’s research on the subject has spanned the length of her entire career thus far, and she has particularly studied the value of restoring indigenous languages using language play and the arts. In her presentation at the Humanities Center Colloquium on November 21, 2024, titled “Indigenous Joy and Language Revitalization,” Piatote discussed the importance of language restoration and how combining language with the arts can overcome barriers to those revitalization efforts.
The Identity of Language
What makes language important? It can sometimes seem like the primary value of learning a new language has to do with how many people you’ll be able to communicate with. But this attitude overlooks the fact that language remains a core part of human experience and selfhood and that it connects people not just with each other but with their culture and land and history.
For Piatote, this reality fuels her work as an artist and scholar as she works to revitalize her own heritage language of Nez Perce, the native language of the central-Idaho-based Nimiipuu people. She gave an example of how all these aspects are interconnected: In Nez Perce, the word for ocean literally means “distant water,” an apt description considering the tribe’s inland location. She said, “Even when I’m standing with my feet in the water of the San Francisco Bay, it’s still ‘distant water’. . . . The language calls back to the land.”
Knowing this interconnectedness between language and culture helps us understand how crucial language preservation becomes for indigenous communities. When communities lose their heritage languages, they lose the knowledge of the relationships between words and grammar that revealed how their ancestors understood the world. As a result, some who work in indigenous language revitalization call themselves language healers, a term that Piatote likes for its dual nature. “The work is about healing the wound of languages being stripped away from their communities,” she said. And for Piatote, her language is such a source of hope that she turns to her dictionary for comfort when she finds herself in despair. “[I can] connect to its comforting and lively presence,” she said. “So, for me, the language itself is a great healer.”
Barriers and Solutions
However, restoring an endangered language comes with a myriad of difficulties. One of these is simply the self-consciousness of language workers—people like Piatote who work to revitalize languages. Languages become endangered when few children are born into them as native speakers, which in turn makes older children and adults the primary language workers. “[Older speakers] can be self-conscious about speaking and not nailing the sounds right away, or about making mistakes,” Piatote said. She explained that often older speakers also feel immense pressure to use the language “right” by speaking exactly how their ancestors did, worrying that to do otherwise would somehow “break” the language, which adds further to their unwillingness to speak.
Through play, we affirm that the language is strong and we can’t break it.
In addition to this self-consciousness, Piatote listed other difficulties: few immersive environments, like grocery stores or cafés; shame, where speakers feel responsible for the loss of a language that was taken from them before they were even born; and even trauma responses, where the idea of their language being “endangered” causes communities to reject the language entirely as a defense mechanism.
In response to these challenges, Piatote has experimented with the arts as a potential solution. In her own work, she’s adopted a strategy of incorporating Nez Perce words into her poetry: for example, she translated the Emily Dickinson poem “To Make a Prairie” into Nez Perce, which has no word for clover, and she created an original blended English-Nez Perce poem about the word kawatí:t (“at the same time”) that uses the phrase repeatedly in different contexts. This intentional use of her language in her art has given her the freedom to experiment with her language in new and creative ways.
Over the past 10 years, Piatote has taught others to do this too, with a lot of success. She created an indigenous poetics lab at UC Berkeley that encourages others to use any aspect of the arts in their language work, from dancing to visual arts to the written word. “In my experience, this strategy is effective at creating an environment of play and authority in the language,” she said, explaining that play first allows the nervous system to move out of trauma responses and then helps integrate the language into the body by performance of the work. “Through authorship, we gain authority with our languages, and through play, we affirm that the language is strong and we can’t break it. . . . The language is a living being and is going to find ways to live and bodies to live in, and we just have to invest our energy into whatever area we can contribute to.”
Learn more about the Nimiipuu people and their language here