“My purpose is to fill out our knowledge of that language, and it involves a lot of different things-recording different kinds of speech, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and trying to integrate that information with material that earlier linguists have collected.”
“What I find interesting about it is the richness of the archive and the challenge of figuring out how the language as it was documented in 1905 is similar to or different from the language we can hear now. The project is trying to pull all of that into one big picture of a single language.”
“It is frustrating to work with a language where all the speakers are very elderly. During the time I have been working on the language one very good speaker has died, and another came close to death but now is fine...it can be discouraging and a little scary. Also on a practical level, they're all sort of deaf so that's been an obstacle.”
“The field has collectively recognized in the last 10, 20 years what has been true for a long time but came into everyone's consciousness recently-that a huge amount of languages in the world are going to be dead in 50 to 100 years.”
“The root of the problem is really social because what society is doing to small communities and small groups of people has an effect on those people and thus has an effect on their languages.”
“The result of the intense orientation toward those English tests is that some schools that have or are near Native American communities are tending to drop native language programs because they feel they don't have the time or resources.”
