Faculty Member Up-Close Profile
Eric Elliott, Head Linguist, Pechanga/UCR Takic Language
Revitalization Project
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE DEGREE OF
ENDANGERMENT OF THESE LANGUAGES?
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| Eric teaching the children’s
class at Pechanga. |
There are no longer any dominant native
speakers of Luiseño, i.e., speakers whose primary
vehicle for thought is the Luiseño language. There
are, however partial and passive speakers of the Rincón,
La Jolla, and Pauma dialects. These passive speakers are
now stepping forward and providing valuable new information
on glosses both already attested but not sufficiently described
in the extant literature, as well as on hitherto unattested
vocabulary.
There are no longer any speakers of Pass Cahuilla.
At least five native speakers of Mountain Cahuilla are
still alive, one still in her forties, the rest over seventy
years of age. Of Desert Cahuilla there are perhaps a dozen
or so nearly fluent speakers, all at least in their forties,
most in their fifties, and one fully fluent speaker, in
his eighties.
There are no longer any dominant native
speakers of Cupeño. The last dominant native speaker
of the language, Rosinda Nolasquez, died in the mid 1980’s.
There are perhaps half a dozen individuals with a passive
understanding of rudimentary Cupeño.
There is one dominant speaker of Serrano remaining,
aged ninety-two, now bed-ridden, unable to speak, and extremely
hard of hearing. In addition, there are three individuals
who grew up in partially Serrano speaking households and
who have a fairly good, though long untapped, grasp on
basic Serrano. These three individuals are all in their
sixties.
WHAT FORMS OF DOCUMENTATION DO YOU THINK WILL HELP WITH LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION
EFFORTS?
No one has attempted to document the knowledge of remaining
elder native speakers, to organize and review all the data
heretofore amassed on any of these languages, while simultaneously
undertaking the revitalization of the Takic languages via
immersion of preschool children. The best way to capture
native speaker knowledge is through elicitation of spontaneous
speech: all remaining native speaker elders must be approached.
If possible, their life stories must be recorded in their
native language in a permanent audio-visual format. No
one has ever sought to digitally document any native California
language in its entirety, complete with sound and picture
files for all possible glosses.
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO PRESERVE THE LANGUAGES?
Practical, elementary pedagogical grammars only
exist for Luiseño and Cahuilla, and for Serrano
in manuscript form. The extant Luiseño and Cahuilla
pedagogical grammars are woefully incomplete. With the
exception of Luiseño, none of the Takic languages
has a dictionary which attempts to include data from all
the published and unpublished sources ever accumulated
on any of the languages in question. No one has developed
digital dictionaries with sound, providing accurate pronunciation
of all the entries, let alone full declensions of all nouns,
and full conjugations of all verbs. Also sorely lacking
are Duden style encyclopedic grammars showing examples
of context. We need indigenous versions of Le Bon Usage
(Grevisse 1991) for all the languages in question. Without
multiple examples in context, dictionaries are little more
than stale word lists.
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