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  • Bringing our languages home: Language revitalization for families ed. by Leanne Hinton
  • Nancy H. Hornberger
Bringing our languages home: Language revitalization for families. Ed. by Leanne Hinton. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2013. Pp. xx, 264. ISBN 9781597142007. $20.

How does one concretely go about reclaiming a heritage language with no living speakers? or with only a few members of an elder generation of native speakers? How does one do this within a family? an extended family? a school? a community? The authors in this book have tackled these questions in their own lives and share with us their wisdom, strategies, achievements, challenges, and hopes from the vantage point of twenty and more years of experience in these endeavors.

The book, beautifully edited by Leanne Hinton, takes us through language reclamation projects that range from individual families working from scratch to recreate a sleeping language within their own home—the Baldwin family reclaiming Myaamia and Jessie Little Doe Baird and her family reclaiming Wampanoag—to families working with the last generation of native-speaker elders—the Albers family remembering Karuk elder Auntie Violet, and Richard Grounds and his daughter Renée recounting purposeful strategies their family adopted to learn Yuchi. Other families benefited from a context of community support in reclaiming Mohawk (the Peters), Māori (O’Regan), Hawaiian (Wilson and Kamanā), Anishinaabe (Noori), and Irish (Mac Póilin). Or they found support in structured family language-learning programs—the Hernandez family learning Kawaiisu (as told by Grant and Turner) and the Taic/CNSA organization reviving Scottish-Gaelic (Macleoid). There are also two cases of efforts by parents to teach their child a language far from the speech community—the Bielenberg Pittaka family attempting to raise their son as a fluent speaker of a fading Greek dialect, Kypriaka, and Ken Hale teaching his twin sons Ezra and Caleb to speak Warlpiri, a central Australian aboriginal language.

It is now more than twenty years since that same Ken Hale and colleagues (1992) drew linguists’ attention in the pages of this journal to the ‘worldwide erosion of the languages spoken by indigenous and minority populations’, as Hinton puts it in her introduction (xiii). This book is about ‘another pattern emerging … of individuals and communities striving to strengthen or regain aspects of their heritage cultures … a movement away from … cultural annihilation’ (xiii). Most of the languages included here are Native North American languages, complemented by cases from Māori and Hawaiian, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Kypriaka and Warlpiri.

Among the memorable lessons in the Baldwin family’s account of their multidecade experience recreating Myaamia in their home are teaching/learning how the language thinks, staying in the language, and moving ‘away from language being the target to language just being part of life in the home’ (13); and among the favorite practices remembered are the penny jar from which one earned a penny for using the language and had a penny taken away for forgetting to. In the second chapter of Part 1 (‘Starting from zero’), Jessie Little Doe Baird speaks of accepting responsibility for making a place for her language to be welcomed back into her community, giving it to her children, and patiently communicating with nonspeakers. She began learning her language by teaching herself, studying Algonquian linguistics to access documentation from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and she went on to teach others, continue her research, and write a layperson’s grammar. Today the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project has embarked on a master-apprentice fluency program with future plans for children’s television programming, an after-school theatre program, and an immersion school. [End Page 540]

In Part 2 (‘Learning from the elders’), Phil and Elaina (Supahan) Albers tell a poignant story of the inspiration and bountiful Karuk knowledge Elaina’s Auntie Violet passed on to them and their first child, but also of the pain of her unexpected death in a house fire, and the fear of losing in her their strongest language tool and their ‘confidence in Karuk language survival’ (36), a pain and fear surmounted only after a time by the joy of seeing their own young children...

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