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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 827-831



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Book Review

Indigenous Literacies of the Americas:
Language Planning from the Bottom Up

International Journal of the Sociology of Language 132:
Indigenous Language Use and Change in the Americas


Indigenous Literacies of the Americas: Language Planning from the Bottom Up. Edited by Nancy Hornberger. (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997. 393 pp., introduction, maps, illustrations, bibliographies, afterword, index. $141.45 cloth.)

International Journal of the Sociology of Language 132: Indigenous Language Use and Change in the Americas. Edited by Teresa L. McCarty and Ofelia Zepeda. (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998. 210 pp., map, table, bibliographies, two book reviews. $46.00 paper.)

A library seeking a core collection of up-to-date information about the crisis in language endangerment could hardly do better than to acquire the two books reviewed here and the two books reviewed at the end of Teresa L. McCarty and Ofelia Zepeda’s issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Languages (IJSL) (the works reviewed there are Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, 1996, and Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages, 1994). The focus of IJSL and Nancy Hornberger’s Indigenous Literacies, broadly speaking, is on languages of the Americas, including Hawai‘i, the issues of language shift, and the global grassroots efforts to revitalize endangered languages.

Together, the two publications treat the following languages: Euchee [End Page 827] (Yuchi), Guarani, Hualapai, Karuk, the Mayan languages of Guatemala, Mexicano (Nahuatl), (native) Hawaiian, Navajo, Nuu Savi (Mixtec), Popoluca, Pueblo de Cochiti Keres, Quechua/Quichua, Shawnee, Tohono O’odham (Papago), Ulwa, Yowlumne, and Yup’ik. There are discussions of Hualapai and Navajo in both volumes, and of the forty-one contributors to the two works, six appear in both. There is only one case of partial duplication of the same material, however: a Navajo “language autobiography” in IJSL appears in expanded form in Indigenous Literacies. Two contributions to IJSL appear in Spanish. Otherwise everything was either written in English or has been translated into English.

The current language-shift crisis is succinctly characterized by Michael Krauss in IJSL: of the approximately three hundred indigenous languages known to have been spoken in what today is the United States, nearly half are now extinct. Of the remaining 155, only 11 percent are being transmitted from parents to children; 17 percent are spoken by parents but not by their children; 40 percent are spoken by grandparents but not by parents and children; and 31 percent are spoken by only the oldest people and usually by very small numbers. The pattern, if not the absolute numbers and identical percentages, also holds for Canada and throughout Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. Massive language shift is under way from the many indigenous languages of the Americas to the dominant languages, English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Throughout the 1990s linguists have been acutely concerned about this impending reduction of linguistic diversity, which they compare with the concurrent global decline in biodiversity. Areas of research on language shift include documentation of endangered languages on the brink of extinction (archiving grammatical descriptions, dictionaries, and sample texts); observation of the process of shift, including contexts and triggers for code-switching between languages; and efforts at reversal of language shift. It appears that revitalization strategies succeed, at least in the short run, when they are homegrown. Efforts from the outside by “well-intentioned others” (IJSL, 110) to implement revitalization and literacy programs have often been ineffective, but grassroots programs offer some hope of success.

The format of both volumes is designed to provide speakers of endangered languages a forum in which to describe how intergenerational transmission of their languages has been compromised and what they hope and expect from the future. As originally planned, Indigenous Literacies was to have two contributors per language, a language-community member and a scholar (linguist, anthropologist, teacher) with substantial experience in that community. This concept has been realized in somewhat [End Page 828] different ways for...

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