American Indian Nations
American Indian Nations
 











 

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?

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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