P1 Native Americans' Languages on the brink of extinction

Community activists and scientists in Vancouver, British Columbia are trying to keep the minority languages alive.

One of the diminishing native American languages is Siletz Dee-ni, which was once spoken widely by native people in Oregon, but now may be spoken fluently by only one man: Alfred "Bud" Lane. He expressed via telephone at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science :

"We're a small tribe on the central Oregon coast.Like most small groups of people, our pool of speakers has been reduced over a period of time, until the 1980s when very few speakers were left. Linguists labeled it 'moribund.' "

"Our people and council decided that was not going to happen," Lane said. "We devised a plan to go forward and begin teaching our dialect on the reservation."

Now schoolchildren in theSiletz Valley School learn Siletz Dee-ni two days a week. Lane said they're picking it up faster than he ever hoped.Still, the coast isn't clear. Whether Siletz Dee-ni can become spoken well enough, and by a large enough group of people to continue being used in daily life remains to be seen.

"Language extinction is not an inevitability, although it is a very strong trend that is going on right now," said K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College who worked with Lane to assemble an online talking dictionary of more than 14,000 words in the Siletz Dee-ni language.

The dictionary, sponsored by National Geographic's Enduring Voices project and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, is just one of many linguists are compiling to record the world's dwindling collection of endangered languages before it's too late.