Faculty Member Special Profile
Eric Elliott, Head Linguist, Pechanga/UCR Takic Language
Revitalization Project
HOW CRITICAL IS THE SITUATION?
The indigenous communities of Southern California want not only to be
able to understand their own rich linguistic heritage, but also to describe
the world around them at present and in the future.
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We are facing immanent language death of all the
remaining Takic languages. If we fail to act now,
we will have to rely on the small percentage of data
collected out of the totality that represents a native
speaker’s body of knowledge about his/her language.
There is simply no replacement for a native speaker’s
wealth of knowledge. This is why we must rush to
put a microphone in front of all the remaining Takic
native speakers. This way, even after language death
occurs, we will still have hundreds of hours of as
yet unanalyzed sound recordings and written records
of native speakers to work through. Fortunately,
we already have some sound recordings and written
records on Takic languages dating back to the early
twentieth century. However, only individuals with
an in-depth understanding of the Takic world view
and of Takic linguistics can possibly hope to interpret
these priceless sound recordings and written records
which are already available but as yet completely
unanalyzed, let alone transcribed and/or translated.
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WHAT TOOLS WOULD YOU LIKE TO HELP CREATE?
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| Eric with his children at home. |
What these communities are clamoring for is a vibrant
linguistic tool with which to express themselves in the
twenty-first century. The indigenous communities of Southern
California want not only to be able to understand their
own rich linguistic heritage, but also to describe the
world around them at present and in the future. With adequate
documentation of these languages we can provide the building
blocks with which any thought may then be expressed in
a Takic language, including any thought involving intimate
knowledge of the complex technical world of the twenty-first
century. These communities want a living language which
will allow their children to grow up bilingual in the truest
sense of the word, i.e., possessing that native-speaker
ability to formulate and express any thought, no matter
how modern or abstract, in either of the two languages
in question. Total functional bilingualism is already a
reality for many in such countries as Canada (French/English)
or Belgium (Flemish/French), but there is, to our knowledge,
no indigenous language of the Americas which currently
can be classified as a well-equipped medium for expressing
the most abstract of twenty-first century academic, technical,
or scientific thought. Thus, Native Americans are often
forced to revert to English, French, or Spanish to describe
the twenty-first century world around them. We may turn
to such well documented success stories of language revitalization
as that of Irish (Gaelic), a language ill equipped to describe
the world of the twentieth century until the newly sovereign
Irish Republic actively undertook the modernization of
Irish vocabulary in the 1920’s by creating new terminology
using the rich, already existing indigenous morphology
of Irish (Gaelic), and by sensible, measured borrowing
of vocabulary of foreign (non-Gaelic) origin.
Our ultimate goal is therefore to make Luiseño,
Cahuilla, Cupeño, and Serrano not only tools for
understanding the past, but also implements for molding
and describing a future that the next generation of bilingual,
dominant speakers has yet to imagine. By respecting the
elders, by turning to them and documenting their life experiences
in their own words and in their own language, we can bridge
the gap between the past and the future by developing an
extensive data base from which to build new vocabulary.
Elders, seeing that we respect the wisdom that they have
accumulated over a lifetime, are, in turn, beginning to
understand the wisdom of adapting the traditional language
to the twenty-first century. We can accomplish nothing
without the elders’ guidance. With them we can secure
a new generation of speakers who understand their past
and can determine their own future via the medium of their
own ancestral language.
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