Dead linguist’s works save extinct tribe languages

Some American Indians are gathering to practice their language.

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) — The first time Jose Freeman heard his tribe’s lost language through the crackle of a 70-year-old recording, he cried.

“My ancestors were speaking to me,” Freeman said of the sounds captured when American Indians still inhabited California’s Salinas Valley. “It was like coming home.”

The last native speaker of Salinan died almost a half-century ago, but today many indigenous people are finding their extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a linguist who died in 1961 and scholars at the University of California, Davis, who are working to transcribe his life’s obsession.

Linguist John Peabody Harrington spent four decades gathering more than 1 million pages of phonetic notations on languages spoken by tribes from Alaska to South America. When the technology became available, he supplemented his written records with audio recordings — first using wax cylinders, then aluminum discs. In many cases his notes provide the only record of long-gone languages.

Martha Macri, who teaches California Indian Studies at UC Davis and is one of the principal researchers on the J.P. Harrington Database Project, is working with American Indian volunteers to transcribe Harrington’s notations. Researchers hope the words will bridge the decades of silence separating the people Harrington interviewed from their descendants.

Freeman hopes his 4-month-old great-granddaughter will grow up with the sense of heritage that comes with speaking her ancestors’ language.

“When we lose our language, we’re getting cut off from our roots,” he said. “The world view that our ancestors carried is quite different from the Euro-American world view. And their language can carry that world view back to us.”

Although it will be years before all the material can be made available, some American Indians connected to the Harrington Project have already begun putting it to use.

Members of Freeman’s tribe gather on their ancestral land every month to practice what they’ve learned — a few words, some grammar, old songs.