It’s one thing to be immersed in a language. It’s another to speak it. And Ava Silva, who grew up in the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe’s, wasn’t fluent in Alabama.
“My áapo’s first language is Alabama,” said Silva, using the Alabama word for grandmother. “I could never fully understand it, but … I loved sitting beside her and just hearing her talk.”
At Harvard, Silva quickly connected with Assistant Professor of Linguistics Tanya Bondarenko. Within months, Bondarenko’s WOLF Lab (Working on Language in the Field) began studying the innerworkings of Alabama. Over the summer, Bondarenko and five linguistics students traveled to the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in East Texas to document, preserve, and revitalize the endangered language.
Alabama is no longer naturally transmitted to Alabama-Coushatta children, Bondarenko explained. “In my community, language is such a beautiful thing, but it’s also a point of pain,” she said.
“To know the language is to know the culture, and the culture feeds from the language.”
Ava Silva
For those in her grandmother’s generation, enrolling in primary school brought their first encounters with English. “They were hit with rulers and dealt with some stuff trying to adapt into this English-speaking society,” Silva said. “So there’s a lot of people who didn’t teach their kids [Alabama] because they have that pain with them.”
The pattern sounded familiar to Bondarenko, who specializes in syntax, semantics, and linguistic fieldwork. “These are the stories we encounter all the time,” she said. “Other people come and take their land, try to take everything else from them, try to prohibit people from speaking their language and from doing their cultural practices. It’s heartbreaking, and an important factor in why languages cease to be spoken.
“A lot of languages in the world are endangered, around 44 percent,” she continued. “If the work is not done, we will just lose the languages and even information about those languages completely.”
WOLF Lab provides opportunities for linguists interested in field work and understudied languages. During their visit with the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe this summer, the team worked on elicitations with 19 native speakers to learn how Alabama is spoken today and gather recordings of the language in use. The team collected more than 140 hours of recordings that were already shared with the community and are now being analyzed in Cambridge.
As a community coordinator, Silva helped WOLF Lab identify native speakers. She also partnered with the morphology team to research the verb conjugations.
“To be able to do this project and say, ‘This language is so beautiful and I’m sorry that anyone ever made you feel like it wasn’t,’ has been something I love,” Silva said. “You see them light up and have this moment of healing.”
Jacob Kodner, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics and member of the lab, noted that many linguistic theories are based on English or other Indo-European languages. “For me, as a linguist, it is particularly important to look at languages that are not Indo-European,” he said. “If we want to have a theory of how language works well, we have to have a better sample size.”
He underscored how many Indigenous languages spoken in North America are “critically endangered,” with low numbers of native speakers. While many North American linguists opt to pursue their studies abroad, he argued they can make a greater impact working with Indigenous communities on this continent.
“That’s the beautiful thing about the study of linguistics, to learn more about what these languages have in common and how they differ,” Kodner said.
Findings and future plans were presented to the tribal council. The linguists plan to return to the reservation for further field work over the winter and next summer.
As an Indigenous person and a linguist, Silva also believes it’s crucial to document, preserve, and revitalize Indigenous languages such as Alabama. She argued that revitalization work, in particular, helps Native communities come together. But the work carries deep cultural value as well.
“To know the language is to know the culture,” she said, “and the culture feeds from the language.”
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