As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Indian tribes of New York’s Long Island, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.
The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members to speak them, said representatives from the tribes and Stony Brook’s Southampton campus.
Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.
“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”
The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many tribes, language is a cultural glue that holds a community together . Bruce Cole, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language “the DNA of a culture.”
The odds against success can be overwhelming, given the small number of potential speakers .
Of the more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States, only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. This nonprofit group estimates that without restoration efforts, no more than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.
There are 400 registered members of the Unkechaug tribe, which maintains a 21-hectare reservation in Mastic. The Shinnecocks have about 1,300 enrolled members and have a reservation adjacent to Southampton.
Robert D. Hoberman, the chairman of the linguistics department at Stony Brook, is overseeing the academic side of the project.
Shinnecock and Unkechaug are part of a family of Algonquian languages. Some have both dictionaries and native speakers, Mr. Hoberman said, which the team can mine for missing words , and for grammatical structure.
The reclamation is a two-step process, the professor explained. “First we have to figure out what the language looked like,” using remembered prayers, greetings, sayings and word lists, like the one Jefferson created, he said. “Then we’ll look at languages that are much better documented, look at short word lists to see what the differences are and see what the equivalencies are, and we’ll use that to reconstruct what the Long Island languages probably were like.”
“When we have an idea of what the language should sound like, the vocabulary and the structure, we’ll then introduce it to people in the community,” Mr. Hoberman said.
While it may seem impossible to recreate the sound of a lost tongue, Mr. Hoberman said the process was helped not all that mysterious because the dictionaries were transliterated into English.
“Would someone from 200 years ago think we had a funny accent?” Mr. Hoberman asked. “Yes. Would they understand it? I hope so.”
By PATRICIA COHEN
