‘Rosetta Stone’ of a dying language
Teaching method helping to revive Native tongues
‘Indigenous languages are extremely different from English.’
IVONA KUCEROVA, Center for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics at McMaster University
SIX NATIONS OF THE GRAND RIVER, Ontario — When Brian Maracle returned in his mid-40s to the Mohawk community near Toronto that he had left when he was just 5, he didn’t have a job and knew almost no one there.
But perhaps the biggest challenge facing him was that he neither spoke nor understood much Kanyen’keha, the Mohawk language. More than a century of attempts by Canada’s government to stamp out Indigenous cultures had left Maracle and many other Indigenous people without their languages.
Now, 30 years later, Maracle has become a champion of Mohawk and is helping revive it and other Indigenous languages, both in Canada and elsewhere, through his transformation of teaching methods.
“I never studied linguistics; I don’t have any teacher training. My parents weren’t speakers,” he said in his office at an adult language school he founded about two decades ago in his community, the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, southwest of Toronto. Yet linguistics academic conferences now feature him as a speaker.
Innovative approaches such as Maracle’s are crucial, experts say, to overcoming the suppression of Indigenous languages and cultures in Canada.
From the 19th century into the 1990s, thousands of Indigenous students were taken from their homes, sometimes by force, and placed into Canada’s residential schools system. There, they were forbidden from speaking their languages and from practicing their traditions in what a national commission later characterized as “cultural genocide.”
The system failed to entirely eradicate Indigenous languages, but its effect was nevertheless devastating for the 60 Indigenous languages found in Canada.
Today, restoring Indigenous languages has been a component of Canada’s push for reconciliation with its Indigenous people, a top priority of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Four years ago, the government passed the Indigenous Languages Act, which formally recognizes the importance of these languages and requires the allocation of money — more than 700 million Canadian dollars to date — for teaching them.
But none of that was around when Maracle arrived at Six Nations, and the program that was available, he found, was ill-suited for adult students.
“Indigenous languages are extremely different from English,” said Ivona Kucerova, the director of the Center for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “But typically what you see is that the local Indigenous language teaching methodologies are designed to teach Western languages.”
Maracle said the problem with his first, unsuccessful lesson was that the instructors, generally Mohawk elders without training as language teachers, were tossing out “whole words.”
“They just expected by dropping a word on you and saying it louder that you’d somehow figure it out,” Maracle said. “They didn’t understand how the language really is structured.”
A small grant allowed Maracle and three other people from Six Nations to try to determine exactly what that structure was.
Maracle found the answer about 25 years ago in the office of David Kanatawakhon-Maracle, no direct relation, a lecturer at the Western University in London, Ontario.
“There were little bits of paper all over this big table,” Maracle recalled. The lecturer told Maracle words he had been longing to hear: “He said, ‘I think I’ve got a new way of teaching the language.’”
There were about 60 slips of paper on his office table, and they “were the Rosetta Stone of all the things that you need to be a competent beginning speaker,” Maracle said.
Kanyen’keha is a poly synthetic language, where a single word can function as an entire sentence. Those words are made up of morphemes, small elements that change their meaning depending on how they are combined.
The slips of paper contained the morphemes, which are the building blocks for the entire language.
“This was huge,” Maracle said.
Understanding that these elements were the key to unlocking the language was the breakthrough Maracle needed to attain fluency. But other students at the school he helped start in 1999 were still struggling. It became apparent that someone needed to build a curriculum and teaching program around the morphemes, including a color-coded system for grouping them, which Maracle did through trial and error.
In comparison with other languages, Kanyen’keha relies heavily on verbs. Objects are generally described by what they do. The word for “computer,” for example, roughly translates as “it brings things up.”
So its speakers, Maracle said, need to analyze the world in terms of action rather than objects.
Kucerova, the director of the linguistics center in Hamilton, regards Maracle as a linguist despite his lack of formal training. She said tests showed that his students emerged with a university-level fluidity in two years.
“I have never seen anyone else bring adult learners to that level of language, to be able to speak at this level after two years,” she said, adding that Mohawk ranks with Arabic in terms of difficulty for English-speaking students. “That’s really astonishing.”