A Stream of Voices

Taking the Train to Dublin City: A Journey to Speaking Irish in Ireland’s Capital

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 01:02:29 GMT

It takes me about twenty minutes to walk from my parents’ house to the train station in Donabate, North County Dublin, Ireland. I don’t need to read the street signs to find my way around the once-small village I lived in as a child, but I often take note of one that points toward the graveyard. It reads “Reilig,” and it reminds me of my family members buried there.

I walk by my old secondary school, a relatively modern building that was constructed when I was a student, and I see the impossible-to-miss sign on the front: “Coláiste Pobail Domhnach Beathach”—Donabate Community College. I remember my Irish-language teacher and I smile, thinking that it was probably because of her brave commitment to Irish and its place in this town that the sign got there. There’s a new building beside my old school that was built after I graduated: an Irish-language primary school. I wish I was born late enough to attend. Sometimes those students walk with their teachers in the village, and it brings me endless joy to hear their joy—their joy through Irish.

I get to the station and hear the familiar warning: “Seasaigí taobh thiar den líne bhuí, le bhur dtoil”—please stand back behind the yellow line. I always think about my granddad, Richard, as I wait for my train to the city. Throughout his entire career, he worked for the railway and was a signalman in Donabate station. He and Grandma Dolores always encouraged my connection to the Irish language. Grandma Dolores would tell me about her experience going to an Irish-medium primary school in Dublin city when she was four. I remember how she used to laugh as she explained that she didn’t have a clue what was going on the first time she stepped into the classroom. She can’t tell me that story anymore, but I can pass on her laughter.

My Granddad Richard working at Donabate train station.

Photo courtesy of Alexandra Philbin

I used to go to this train station with her and Granddad Richard on the way to visit her mother, my Nana Lily. My cousins and I once danced in the garden of Nana’s nursing home in Dún Laoghaire. Nana and Grandma sang, “a haon, dó, trí, a haon, dó, trí,” as our little feet tapped away to their beat.

Granddad Richard always calls me when he has watched a show on TG4, the Irish-language television channel, and we often try to remember songs that he knew as a child. It is through him that I am connected to the person who is probably the last in my family to have spoken Irish as a first language, one of his grandmothers. I discovered this by looking at census records from 1901 and 1911, which show that she was an Irish speaker.

By the early twentieth century, the people of Ireland had endured hundreds of years of British colonial rule that brought with it violence and dispossession. Memories of An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine in the 1840s and 1850s that caused the death of about one million people, were still fresh. For many, the Irish language was attached to experiences of poverty, suffering, and violence, and English was imposed as the language of economic success.

Perhaps it was this that led my great-great-grandmother to turn to English when she moved away from her native home in the Conamara region to eastern Ireland, eventually settling in Dublin, the capital. Granddad Richard has told me that he can’t remember her ever speaking Irish there. I think often about what might have led her to make that decision.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced a cultural revival as part of its independence movement. The Irish language was promoted as a marker of identity that separated the Irish people from the English. After part of Ireland gained independence, the new Republic of Ireland established Irish as its first official language.

While it was recognized that Irish was an important part of the entire nation, certain regions were acknowledged as more Irish-speaking than others. These largely rural areas, known as the Gaeltacht regions, are home to a higher proportion of Irish speakers, who some believe use the language more “authentically.” Sometimes people do not consider Irish spoken outside of these areas as equally important. Irish speakers in Dublin, outside of the Gaeltacht, are at times forgotten and erased despite the relatively high number of speakers in absolute terms. Speaking Irish is not seen as the norm in Dublin, and this negatively impacts language use. Perhaps this, too, played a part in my great-great-grandmother leaving her language behind when she left one of these Gaeltacht areas.

Me as a baby with Granddad Richard

Photo courtesy of Alexandra Philbin

Granddad Richard and Grandma Dolores were born into an independent Irish state, and since then, members of my family have been able to learn Irish at school and attend immersion summer camps in a Gaeltacht region. But none of this has overcome the centuries of oppression that came before, the ideas and behaviors around Irish that came from that period, and the association between Irish and only certain areas of the country. In fact, some of my family’s experiences in school added to their disconnect from the language.

Throughout the twentieth century, English remained the dominant language in my family, but Irish hadn’t completely disappeared. It was still in Nana and Grandma’s dance cheers and Granddad’s songs. Certain words were sometimes used in Irish instead of their English counterpart, like geansaí instead of “jumper.” Irish grammar could also be found in the structures used in English, like “he gave out to me” for “he scolded me,” which comes from the Irish term ag tabhairt amach. But it wouldn’t be until the twenty-first century that a member of our family would embrace Irish as theirs again and push for their life in Dublin to be a life in Irish.

I was born in 1996 and consider myself lucky to have been raised with more freedom than many Irish people had during the last few hundred years. I had good experiences learning Irish in school, and the language was one of my favorite subjects from a young age. My parents responded positively.

My mum remembers some Irish that she learned in school, but she felt distant from it for a long time. My dad is English and only recognizes a few words in Irish after thirty years of living in Ireland. One of his great-grandfathers moved from Ireland to England in the nineteenth century, and was possibly an Irish speaker, but we don’t know much about him. My parents have regrets about not learning and speaking more Irish, but they were discouraged when they were younger and have since had other priorities. Their relationship to Irish has become more positive due to my involvement with it, which pushes me to continue. We have supported each other mutually in that way.

From when I was eleven, my parents encouraged me to attend Irish-language summer camps, first in Dublin and later in the Conamara Gaeltacht. I returned to the area that my great-great-grandmother was from and was fully immersed in the language for the first time. During the summer, I would go to classes, play sports, and make friends in Irish. I was able to attach so many happy memories and experience key moments of adolescence through the language. This helped to battle the shame that had been attached to it for generations. Still, returning to my hometown after summer camp meant returning to a life mainly in English. I found it hard to imagine Irish connecting to my life in Dublin. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve learned to see that it definitely can. My train journeys to the city remind me of this.

Me with my parents, Sharon and Mark, at my graduation

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

I put on my headphones and listen to a podcast or take out a book while I’m on the train. It’s impossible to concentrate on either of these tasks when I hear Irish floating above the seats. It calls out to me. It finds me. I try to catch a glimpse between the seats of who might be speaking—perhaps I know them, or perhaps I don’t. Either way, it catches my attention and makes me happy. I hear teenagers in school uniforms deboard, saying goodbye to their friends. “Slán,” they say, in the most natural way imaginable. Saying goodbye to my school friends like that didn’t seem natural to me when I was in their position only a decade ago. This change, too, makes me happy.

Donabate is about twenty kilometers (twelve miles) from Dublin City, and the train between them takes about half an hour. Although Donabate is a small town that is physically separated from the city, an urban Dublin identity extends beyond the city and suburbs to the entire county. Many people in the town have family from the city, and you often hear inner-city accents in the English spoken there.

Once I get to the city, I’m pulled along in the stream of people heading to work, to museums, to shops, to parks, to no specific destination at all. My destination looks different every time, but it is most often related to the Irish language.

Sometimes I go to a conversation circle, an event where people come together in cafés, parks, or universities to practice and speak Irish together. I’m often nervous when I’m going to a circle for the first time, though this fades quickly once I’m there. Each circle looks different in terms of size, location, and ages and backgrounds of the speakers. But I am always greeted with a warm welcome by all. Groups who may have been coming together weekly at the same time and place for years, if not decades, make me feel like a valued member. I am quickly chatting away about my life and asking them about theirs. I am touched by the interest, curiosity, and support that these people—strangers as of an hour ago—show toward me. I take in their views on what is happening in the world and share some of my own. We learn together.

Sign for the Pop Up Gaeltacht at Hynes’ Bar in Bóthar na gCloch (Stoneybatter)

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

Entrance to the Irish-language pub Club Chonradh na Gaeilge

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

Sometimes, I go to the Pop Up Gaeltacht, an event where speakers come together in a different Dublin pub each month and make Irish heard. I go knowing that it is a movement that began in this very city in 2016 and has since inspired similar events all over the world. I go knowing that it has put Dublin on the Irish-speaking map that it has so often been excluded from. I go knowing that it has inspired so much of my own thinking about the place of Irish in our city.

When I arrive at the pub, the linguistic takeover is sometimes so successful that Irish spills out onto the street. I push my way in. I find old friends and meet new ones. We have a laugh, we solve the world’s problems, and we get noticed. One time, an event was overrun by students attending a Christmas disco; trying to communicate in Irish with people I had met only minutes before while hordes of students screamed “Dancing Queen” beside us had me laughing hysterically. We soon escaped to a neighboring pub and some interested students followed.

Sometimes I go to see a play, a film, a comedy gig, or a concert. I take my seat and look around for familiar faces. I watch a Greek tragedy translated and performed in Irish at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. My dad does, too, thanks to subtitles in English that hover above the stage. I sit in a cinema on O’Connell Street, close to where Grandma Dolores grew up, and watch a film about a group of women in Kerry racing in a naomhóg-rowing competition. I cry, not only because of the film’s moving story and the women’s sharp wit, but for knowing that I am the first in a long line of women in my family to go to the cinema and enjoy a film in Irish. I find a corner to sit among friends in Club Chonradh na Gaeilge, Dublin’s Irish-language pub, and we laugh as we listen to jokes that would smash any image of Irish being the language of the Catholic establishment to pieces. I go to a Kneecap concert and join thousands of people in the Olympia Theatre as we rap verses in Irish at the top of our lungs. All of these events and more like them inspire me endlessly, as I take in speakers’ talent, creativity, and commitment to art in our language.

Sometimes I move my body to the rhythm of the language. With a lot more control than I had as a child Irish dancing in Nana’s nursing home, I stretch and hold and breathe to the sound of the yoga teacher’s instructions and my classmates’ breaths. I feel great after yoga in general, but I feel especially great after yoga in Irish. If the aim is to replenish my mind and spirit, then doing it in Irish makes the most sense. I move to the language at the 1916-themed rave in Club Chonradh na Gaeilge, too. Dancing wildly and screaming in Irish is, while perhaps unorthodox, an interesting way to commemorate a rebellion that aimed to liberate Ireland from British colonial rule. I dance, I laugh, and I think about how lucky I am that I can freely do this in my language.

Club Chonradh na Gaeilge decorated for the 1916-themed rave

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

Books from An Siopa Leabhar, an Irish-language bookshop

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

Sometimes I go to An Siopa Leabhar, an Irish-language bookshop where I buy books for the next generation born into my family. I look through the children’s section and pick out the most colorful picture books. I take a quick look around for myself, grab a book or two more, and head to the till. The children’s books are for my cousins’ children. One tells me about the new Irish words he has learned every time he sees me, his face lighting up as he does. He also enjoys challenging me by giving me words to translate. I am amazed at how quickly he learns to say them and humbled by some of the more difficult ones.

Another, who is only eight months old, laughs hysterically when I speak Irish to her. Throwing her little head back, Zoey revels in the sounds of “Tá tú ar fheabhas ar fad”—you are absolutely amazing. Her favorite song is a song in Irish called “Óró mo Bháidín.” Zoey’s mum, my cousin, is learning Irish on Duolingo. If our family’s history in the twentieth century was one lived in English, I have hope that the twenty-first century will be different. I like to think that the colorful books and stories that I bring back from Dublin help with that.

Sometimes I go to catch up with college friends over a meal. After eating, we walk along the River Liffey (An Life), the river that divides Dublin in two, and take a seat to continue our chats and watch the water. People approach us, having heard us speaking Irish together. “It’s so great to hear Irish!” they say. They ask us where we are from and are quite shocked when I say I’m from Dublin. As we catch up on life, laugh at old stories from university, and people-watch, our casual conversations become something more. They show passersby that something they thought didn’t exist in fact does—that the picture of Dublin that they’ve had in their minds isn’t the full picture, that the linguistic expectations placed on people from and in Dublin don’t need to define us.

Sometimes I walk around the city alone. I try not to walk quickly with my head down and my headphones on. I walk instead with my eyes and ears open to the world. I see the bilingual street signs and try to learn the true street names that I was only ever taught in English. I see stickers in Irish stuck to lamp posts: stickers with a vocabulary lesson in Irish and stickers welcoming immigrants to Dublin that appear the day after a racism-fueled riot takes over part of the city. I hear languages from all over the world. I see moments of connection where strangers meet and share a smile, where old friends run into each other, where a dog lifts their head to meet a human hand. I see tents and sleeping bags everywhere. I see immense poverty.

Stickers around Dublin City: Céad Míle Fáilte (“a hundred thousand welcomes”)

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

Stickers around Dublin City: a vocabulary lesson for a night out in Irish

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

At the end of a day spent in this beautiful and tragic city, I head for the last train home. There are no trains back to Donabate after midnight, so I am often running from an event with other Irish speakers who live in towns on the same train line. We dash through streets full of people out partying. I wonder what they must think as we run by, shouting to each other in Irish about how many minutes we have left before the train leaves. We make it on the train, take our seats, and catch our breath before continuing conversation. We bring the language with us from the city to our towns. I get off at Donabate station and get a lift home. I tell my parents about the day I’ve had and the people I’ve met before saying goodnight to them and the dog and going to bed.

It takes me a while to get to sleep as I am still caught up in the exciting conversations and music and laughter. I feel lucky and privileged that I get to live like this. I think about how my life wasn’t always this way: there were many points in my teenage years when I felt lost and lonely and confused, when I didn’t really understand my place in the world. I don’t feel like that very often anymore. Speaking Irish in Dublin brings me community and brings meaning and purpose to my life. It helps me to imagine that another world is possible: a world where people can speak their language freely, where urban speakers are recognized and supported, and where community is central to how we live our lives. I give thanks to all the Irish speakers who have fought for this world and continue to do so.

Before I close my eyes, my thoughts return to the century that my family has lived in Dublin, a century spent largely detached from our language. It ends with me.

Me with my friend Ellen, speaking Irish over dinner in the city. My T-shirt reads “Ní saoirse go saoirse na mban”—there is no freedom until women are free.

Photo by Alexandra Philbin

Alexandra Philbin is a language revitalization mentor with the Endangered Languages Project and a PhD candidate at the University of València, where she focuses on the use of minoritized languages in urban areas. Her work has taken her many places, but her background as an Irish speaker from Dublin stays with her wherever she goes.

About the Endangered Languages Project

The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online space to share knowledge and stories, explore free learning resources, and build relationships to support Indigenous and endangered language communities around the world. Get in touch at feedback@endangeredlanguages.com.

Torwali Language, Music, and Poetry: An Heirloom of Love from Northern Pakistan

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 05:17:00 GMT

On a cold afternoon in the winter of 2016, my colleague and I parked at a fuel station in the city of Bahrain, northern Pakistan. As we rushed to the station office for some heat, an old man stood by our car. He had a sweet smile on his face, and his eyes were filled with tears. I greeted him, but he waved me away with his hand. I realized he was engrossed by sounds coming from our open car door: a DVD player hooked up to the car stereo was playing the video album Manjoora, a collection of ancient folk songs known in the Torwali language as Zo. 

The old man stood in the cold, moved by these Zo couplets. When the singers finished, the old man turned toward me and asked my name. I told him my name and my role in creating the Manjoora album. He hugged me and kissed my forehead.

That day was a powerful moment in my career of promoting Torwali language and culture, but I have always lived in a place with a rich history of language diversity. I grew up in the Swat region and in other regions of North Pakistan, where more than half of the country’s seventy-eight languages are spoken. Torwali people are of Indo-Aryan descent and are one of the many Indigenous Dardic communities living in the region for over 5,000 years. But between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, during several waves of invasions, many of the Torwalis and other Indigenous groups of Swat were gradually subjugated, driven out, or killed, leading to a substantial loss of Indigenous culture, identity, and language.

Torwali singer-poets Haleem Khan Noorani (left) plays the Bhden and Sitar, and Zahoor Ahmad Torwali (right) plays the rabab.

Photo courtesy of Aftab Ahmad

Today, Torwali people are Sunni Muslim, and we mostly live in the upper reaches of the Swat valley, around the town of Bahrain. An overwhelming majority of Torwalis are multilingual in Torwali, Pashto, and Urdu. A small number can also speak English and other Dardic languages, such as Gawri, Indus Kohistani, and Shina. Until 2004, Torwali was not a written language; today, there are some books written in and about Torwali, but it is still under-resourced. According to my research for the 2017 national census of Pakistan, Torwali is presently spoken by a population of about 140,000 people. Torwali is one of the twenty-seven languages in Pakistan which face attrition and are categorized by UNESCO as endangered.

The Zo and Phal

The story of my involvement in language revitalization starts in my teens. I often went to the jungles in Swat to gather firewood or morel mushrooms. While on the pine tree ridges, I used to hear sweet singing of Zo, traditional Torwali folksongs, by other foragers. The sound mingled with the breeze which gushed over the trees, providing a kind of accompaniment. I also tried to sing loudly. It often became a kind of competition in which the singers could not see each other, only hearing the songs and responding.

Examples of Torwali Zo:

æ mhi theyē sūāl thū othɘl khɘn si borā
ek yæri mi dɘlāl nɘ gɘş dūi ʑo nɘ sɘā

I implore you my beautiful beetle of the high mountain
In matters of love, neither make Zo, nor employ the middleman

Mhun wətən qeməti ab o hawa ye səfa
Uthəl khən si puʃuaa si χaist ɣələba

There is nothing of more value than the clean climate of our country
The flowers of the highlands overwhelm us with their beauty

Examples of Torwali Pahal:

Yæ orān ʑéndé wālū nil gɘyā
ʐād si pæl wɘyi mhi mé būgæwā

As the Oran flashes the green forest,
A stream of blood runs down my chest

Dhut lhegir ɖoli serænæ mhæ dhəyayi dəm pə dəm
Chi æʂi əlmas si chəle hi zed ki tæwi zəχəm

O, girl with red lips burn me again and again
Like diamonds your eyes wounded my heart with pain

Tunu da si bugo dere no cho
Tu mhago si bhoro kekede kho

Do not keep goats of my rival outside
Guard them and eat your milk porridge

When I was young, I would see my mom performing the unique Torwali women’s dance known as naar. Now, the dance is mostly replaced by those from the dominant communities, yet many elderly women and some young women know this special dance. My mother has always been an inspiration for and source of my love of our language and culture. She has also made Zo and remembers hundreds of Zo by others. My mom, now in her seventies, is an Indigenous intellectual, having great knowledge of cultural practices and folk poetry. 

During my childhood, the Torwali community had lost their sense of identity, history, and pride. Centuries of domination had triggered a sense of shame about their culture and language. In most cases, attempts to revitalize our ancestral culture, especially the music, ignites people’s wrath even within our own communities. Many have been indoctrinated immensely by religious extremism and see our musical traditions as sacrilegious.

I became curious about my mother tongue in college because of some unpleasant incidents. I felt that my classmates and some teachers looked down on me for being ethnically different and for using a language other than Pashto. These incidents would haunt me, and I used to be anxious about speaking Torwali. However, because my early youth was embedded in Torwali culture, I resisted some of that feeling of shame. These memories prompted me to not only help revitalize my language and culture but also work on Torwali history in order to reclaim our lost identity.

In 2007, I motivated some other Torwali youth to join me in this mission. We established our small organization with the Urdu name Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi (IBT), which translates to Institute for Education and Development. Since then, our organization has been working for the mobilization and revitalization of Torwali language and culture, along with other endangered languages in the Swat region. IBT has initiated many programs for Torwali language and cultural heritage including the use of Torwali in education, developing a writing system, enhancing literacy among young people, celebrating culture and music through festivals, and documenting folk poetry and music. 

Torwali Music and Poetry

In the past, through the 1980s, Torwali music was popular and sung by everyday people, without specially trained singers, musicians, or poets. Singing was accompanied by instruments like the sitar, ɖhūmām (drum), béʃél (flute), sūrni (traditional pipe), and bhédæn (a pitcher made of mud with its lid tightened with animal hide or string cloth). People used to sing Torwali music during community gatherings and festivities, such as haʃər, a time when villagers came together to cultivate and harvest crops or build a house. Music, singing, and dancing have also been common at wedding ceremonies and other rites of passage. 

Ancient Torwali musical traditions have continued to grow and change in recent times. When audiotapes arrived in the Swat Valley in the 1970s and 1980s, the ability to record led to the growth of Torwali music and poetry.

The author’s cassette recorder used in recording Torwali music in the 1980s.

Photo courtesy of Rahim Sabir

After the late 1990s, however, we noticed a fast decline in Torwali musical traditions. Access to Bollywood movies and drama series through satellite televisions overshadowed Indigenous Torwali music. Soon, songs from Bollywood sung in Urdu, and others sung in Pashto (the dominant language in Pakistan’s northwestern province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the official language of Afghanistan) spread in the area. This coincided with growing puritanical religious extremism. Many locals did not like music and thought it immoral. But due to television, people could not stop the global access to these resources, so their “soft target” became Indigenous music and its singers, musicians, and poets.

Zealous locals exerted influence and pressured these artists. The stigma against music strengthened. Many artists abandoned their art. The surni pipe disappeared. So did the big drum. Soon, people could not openly possess sitar. During this time, because of being continuously marginalized, Torwalis became less confident of their unique identity, less knowledgeable about their history, and less educated, and they became more impoverished. They began to hide their culture and language and tried to assimilate with dominant communities. 

Torwali musical instruments: four sitars (left), rabab (right), and dhumam (below).

Photo courtesy of Rahim Sabir

The Simam Festival of 2011

Music and poetry are the most compelling forms of our culture, especially as our language is mostly oral and has only an oral narrative tradition. We say that in the Torwali language, there are no poems, only songs, and that poetry is singing. Given the undeniable connection between language and culture, the organizers of IBT feel that our language revitalization program must incorporate reclaiming our culture and cultural expressions. 

Against this backdrop, IBT intended to revive the beautiful traditions of music and songs in our ancestral homelands. Soon after the worst religious militancy the Swat Valley had ever seen (from 2006 to 2010), and after monster floods in 2010 in Swat, our organization held its first Indigenous culture festival, called Simam—Torwali for “grandeur, dignity, and celebration.” The three-day festival brought together over 9,000 Torwalis for traditional music, dance, and games. We even included a national seminar on peace and harmony on the final day.

Holding such a festival was a gigantic task with many perils. We produced it in a time when there was still ample chance of attack by the militants and backlash from the community. Our organizing team saw these threats as more motivation. People were traumatized because of the militancy and floods. We knew the festival could be a space for emotional healing. 

Although we faced some backlash from local leaders, since the festival was celebrating our Indigenous culture and heritage, we did not get much pushback from local elderly and religious people, or even individuals from the faction of Torwali people who had moved toward religious extremism. I have been a powerful voice against militarism in Swat, but we included the local political and military leaders in our advocacy for the festival. While we organized the festival, there was a pro-culture and anti-militant government in the province under the Pushtun nationalist secular political party, the Awami National Party. The various leaders of this party respected and accepted my ideas, which allowed us to mobilize and convince our elders that it was safe to publicly play music. In the end, we even got the local religious leaders on board. 

Yet the festival had its challenges. The musicians could not come to the venue with their instruments for fear that they would be harassed. One of the surna players was not allowed by his sons to carry musical instruments and play them. We dismantled his instruments and brought him to the venue in the dark of night. 

After the festival, there were still several mullahs (Muslim religious leaders) who blamed us for spreading fahashi (immodesty) in society. 

New Songs 

The Simam Festival was like a new beginning, a new spring in the revival of Torwali music and poetry. This was the first large public event where Torwali singers sang and played music. Despite the criticism we experienced, we feel the overall response was very positive. IBT involved the village leaders in responding to and managing the criticism. Having received media coverage and tremendous applause from the public, the singers and poets felt encouraged and continued singing and performing after the festival. The Simam festival also helped youth emerge as poets and singers. Musical traditions were rejuvenated at the village level, and this enthusiasm has grown.

Torwali singer-poet Mohammad Zeb (middle) and others sing Torwali Zo at the Simam festival in 2011.

Image courtesy of Aftab Ahmad

To document this recent revival, our organization has encouraged Torwali singers, musicians, and poets to share their art through social media. We have invested in state-of-the-art technology to capture Torwali melodies on video. The Manjoora (gift) video album, released in 2015, is one result. We distributed Manjoora among the community as a gift, and it was shared on YouTube and on other platforms.

In this video from Manjoora, you can see the Zo couplets of the Dubha, a duet, with English translation.

The Future

As a result of the Simam festival and Manjoora, we see the Torwali musical tradition flourishing. New singers and poets are emerging with new styles. Those who were dispirited are now inspirited. Those who had abandoned the music and poetry have rejoined. Elder singers like Haleem Khan, Muhammad Zeb, Nazir, and others have restarted their singing and poetry. One young singer, Shahab Shaheen, has recently become very popular.

Poet and singer Javed Iqbal Torwali felt empowered by the encouragement by our organization to renew his art. He shared the following: 

“I had a liking for Torwali music and poetry in my childhood. I loved to play sitar. But I could not keep musical instruments at home because my father was against music, as he used to be a prayer leader at a mosque.

Over time, and with my growing poverty, I was distracted from my passion, my poetic sense. I abandoned music and poetry. Some fellows advised me to compose religious poetry, and I did. It was liked by many, but I was not content, for I was not allowed to play sitar.

But when I joined IBT, the dead poet and musician in me was reborn, and I began to play sitar and learned to play rabab’, too. IBT has been working on the revitalization of Torwali language and culture. It has been respecting and encouraging the singers and poets, and providing them with spaces where they can perform their art. I learned a lot of new things here. I documented many ancient Torwali Zo. Here, I grew into a recognized poet and cultural activist. Now I have turned to Zo, for I think one can do excellent poetry in it. Now, I can also recognize the vocals of every Torwali singer. I feel very proud of my poetry and playing sitar and rabab’.”

We have continued to be under threat, but we have also continued to work on behalf of our Torwali language and cultural revitalization. We continue toward this goal today.

Zubair Torwali is a writer and activist for the rights of all the marginalized linguistic communities of North Pakistan. He is the founder of the civil society organization Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi (IBT) and the author of Muffled Voices: Longing for a Pluralist and Peaceful Pakistan (2015), among many others. He lives in Bahrain, Pakistan.

About the Endangered Languages Project

The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online space to share knowledge and stories, explore free learning resources, and build relationships to support Indigenous and endangered language communities around the world. Get in touch at feedback@endangeredlanguages.com.

A Guatemalan Immersion School Gives Life to the Maya Kaqchikel Language

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:17:00 GMT

Wa’e’ xtinutz’ib’aj jalal kitzij je nab’ey qatata’, qamama’ je ri xeb’oso winäq ojer.

“Here I will write some of the words of our first fathers, our first grandfathers, those who engendered the people long ago, from the Kaqchikel chronicles.”

In the midwestern highlands of Guatemala, there are currently around 800,000 Kaqchikel people. Unfortunately, only about half of us still speak the Kaqchikel language. Most of the speakers are adults and elderly people. Every year, there are fewer and fewer children who learn to speak it.

I am from the Maya Kaqchikel community in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, and I am the principal of a Kaqchikel language immersion school located in my hometown called Nimaläj Kaqchikel Amaq’. The aim of the school is to provide an education based on the interests and needs of the Kaqchikel people, so that the children in our community can break cycles of poverty and have a better future.

Starting the School

In my family, the last people to speak Kaqchikel were my grandparents. They decided not to teach the language to their children due to the discrimination they would suffer. My father, aunts, and uncles understand it but cannot speak it. My fifty cousins and I never heard one word of Kaqchikel as children. This transition from our native language to another happened not only to my family but to all neighboring families. As I grew up, I watched the death of the Kaqchikel language in my town.

In 2001, my family had the idea to establish a school where the children in our community could learn to speak the language of our ancestors, to understand our culture and traditions, and to feel proud of their identity and Maya heritage. This is how our small school, Nimaläj Kaqchikel Amaq’, was born.

There were many obstacles to overcome at the beginning of the project, but as people say here, “kakikot ustape’ k’o k’ayewal (be happy even though there is trouble).” When we told the teachers that we wanted them to teach all the subjects in the Kaqchikel language, they said that it was impossible to speak only in Kaqchikel to a child who only understands Spanish (the dominant language in our country). As a trial demonstration, we gathered a group of people who did not speak Kaqchikel, and we successfully taught them a series of lessons entirely in the Kaqchikel language. After this experience, the teachers were convinced it could be done.

Kaqchikel language reading materials

Image courtesy of Igor Xoyon

We started teaching the four- to six-year-olds to read, but we did it directly in Kaqchikel. In one of the parent-teacher meetings, one of the mothers got up and complained. She said that children would not be able to read street signs, newspapers, or books since they are all written in Spanish. But the Kaqchikel alphabet is very similar to the Spanish alphabet, so when the children learn to read in the Kaqchikel language, they automatically learn to read in Spanish as well. In a few years, the parents noticed that their children also knew how to read and write in Spanish. Since then, they have been a lot more supportive of learning Kaqchikel.

Kaqchikel immersion school student works on school assignments online. Last year, the school celebrated its first high-school graduate.

Photo courtesy of Igor Xoyon

In November 2022, our school had its first high school graduate, who came to our school when they were four years old. At eighteen, they were not among our top students at the Kaqchikel immersion school, but they nevertheless excelled by the national evaluation standards.

The Guatemalan Ministry of Education manages a standardized evaluation for all high school graduates in math and Spanish reading comprehension. The national average for Spanish reading comprehension is 20 percent. Our graduate received 73 percent! Even though roughly 10 percent of their reading consisted of Spanish materials, the student scored above the national average. Even though our first graduate received most of their education in the Kaqchikel language, they got better results in Spanish than students who received all their education in Spanish. It has been suggested that bilingual students generally have stronger reading comprehension skills, so the results were no surprise to the school staff. In fact, there was an even bigger contrast in the math category: the national average is around 10 percent, but our first graduate earned 86 percent.

With these results, the parents, students, and people in our community are more convinced that an education in an Indigenous language is just as good as—if not better than—monolingual education in Spanish. It reinforces our identity, especially in Guatemala where there is a lot of discrimination against Maya people. Our students don’t experience that inside our school, making for a better learning environment for all.

Building Curriculum

As we built our curriculum, we encountered another challenge: many modern words do not exist in the Kaqchikel language. For example: plastic pipe, helicopter, convection, photocopy, refrigerator, laser beam, etc. To solve this problem, we created words. For “plastic pipe,” we referred to our culture to find something resembling a pipe. It turns out that our ancestors used a blowgun, which they called pub’,to hunt for birds. So, we created the word t’im pub’ (“plastic blowgun”) to refer to plastic pipe. For “helicopter,” we use ch’ich’ tz’unün (“metal hummingbird”). For “photocopy,” we use kwachiwuj (“twin papers”).

In this way, we have managed to create words that we need in order to teach everything in the Kaqchikel language. Every so often, we send our new words to the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala so they can be checked and corrected.

Kaqchikel immersion school created the word for “plastic pipe,” t’im pub’ (“plastic blowgun”) based on blowgun called pub’ to hunt for birds.

Image courtesy of Igor Xoyon

Kaqchikel immersion school created the word for “helicopter,” ch’ich’ tz’unün (“metal hummingbird”).

Photo courtesy of Igor Xoyon

Our goal is to be able to teach all subjects in the Kaqchikel language within the next two years! This will be a huge accomplishment for us. Right now, Kaqchikel is largely used to discuss subjects such as farming and home life, but for the first time, our students will be able to use Kaqchikel to talk about computers, science, history, current events, and other modern topics. The table below shows the subjects we teach from preschool through high school. Those in green are subjects that we can currently teach in Kaqchikel. Shown in orange are subjects that we can almost teach entirely in Kaqchikel but are still lacking some educational materials. Everything in yellow cannot yet be taught in Kaqchikel. While preschool students begin their education in the Kaqchikel language from day one, high school seniors receive only about half of their lessons in the language.

Courses taught fully in Kaqchikel are displayed in green, partial Kaqchikel in orange, and Spanish in yellow.

Image courtesy of Igor Xoyon

Subjects like physics, biology, and chemistry are complicated to teach, especially in a second language, due to the large amount of technical terms. But even teaching them only partly in Kaqchikel is a huge accomplishment; first we had to create all the technical words, then teach those words to the teachers, then teach those words to the students.

We also have to make all these subjects interesting to the students. For example, when the physics class discussed vectors—quantities with both magnitude and direction—the teacher designed a competition in which each student built a bridge using only one hundred popsicle sticks and glue. Once the students built their bridges (using the theory of vectors to make them strong), we applied increasing weight to them until they collapsed. The whole school came to watch the competition, and now vectors are among the favorite subjects for our high school students.

So, not only are we able to teach these subjects in the Kaqchikel language, but we are able to teach them in a way that students actually appreciate! This is one of the main reasons our students achieve impressive abilities in all school subjects.

Dreaming Forward

While our students learn to read in Kaqchikel, there are very few books written in Kaqchikel for them to practice their new skill. We decided to create our own reading materials based on stories from our community. Already, our teachers have written over a thousand stories which our students can now use to practice their reading skills and, at the same time, learn about our culture and history.

An example text that we use is a story that takes place in the time before cars, in a small village in Guatemala. In those days, people would walk to the closest town to sell their goods, such as chickens. In one of the rest stops, a rooster manages to escape his basket and runs into the forest. Below is the first paragraph from this Kaqchikel text.

Ri mama’ äk' xsach chupam ri k’ichelaj
Ri nuxikin wati’t nutzijoj chi ojer kan, rije’ jantape’ jukumaj yeb’e pa tinamït Chixot richin nikik’ayij jujun taq ch’uxtäq; rik’in ri pwäq nikich’äk nikilöq’ jub’a’ atz’am chuqa’ jub’a’ tzakon kab’, k’a ri’ yetzolin pa kochoch richin yeb’e jun mul chik pa samaj.

The rooster got lost in the forest
My grandmother told me that many years ago, the people traveled very early to the town named Chixot to sell their goods. With the money they earned, they bought some salt and sugar, then they returned home so that they could continue working.

Some of our older students have begun writing stories for the younger students. The story below is about a bear who looks everywhere for honey. This exercise shows that our students are confident in their speaking and writing skills, to the point that they, too, make contributions in the revitalization of our language.

Example practice reading material for the Kaqchikel Immersion School.

Image courtesy of Igor Xoyon

Our class of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old students understand everything their teachers say to them in the Kaqchikel language and are able to answer questions in Kaqchikel. They are among the few Kaqchikel people who can read and write in our language. Often, they speak with each other in Kaqchikel. This is a powerful indicator that the students identify with the language, and it is not just a language that they have to use in school. For us, it proves that an immersion school is a good way to help revitalize Indigenous languages and that we do not have to sacrifice our language and culture to build and receive a quality education. This gives us hope the language will continue far into the future.

Igor Xoyon is a professor at Maya Kaqchikel University, where he teaches Maya hieroglyphic writing and Maya math. He has a specialty in bilingual education, with an emphasis in Maya culture, from San Carlos University in Guatemala. He is also the principal of Nimaläj Kaqchikel Amaq’ school.

About the Endangered Languages Project

Folklife Magazine Publishes Series Celebrating Global Language Communities

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 20:42:00 GMT

Around the world, people are working to reclaim and revitalize their Indigenous or minoritized languages. In collaboration with the Endangered Languages Project, a program of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the Language Vitality Initiative has launched A Stream of Voices, an article series sharing the stories—and celebrating the successes—of effective language practices by communities and their advocates.

Each article, written by a language practitioner or learner, explains their unique approach to keeping their language healthy and thriving within a specific, local context. The first article discussed the cultivation of youth engagement in Iyasa language efforts in Cameroon. The second covered the development of a master-apprentice learning program in Manitoba, Canada, drawing on the knowledge of elders, and its pivot to virtual workshops during the pandemic.

Language vitality requires an understanding of language and how it is acquired. In addition to the community goals and needs of the highlighted practitioners, the articles represent the breadth of skills needed in revitalization: teaching, documentation, annotation, archiving, program and collaboration development, and many more.

“The goal of creating these shareable stories is to help others understand the depth and breadth of work within the language vitality field,” said Hali Dardar, program coordinator at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

The series title, “A Stream of Voices,” is drawn from Dr. Emmanuel Ngué Um’s speech about the Basaa language at the 2022 Festival of Indigenous Languages. It speaks to the care and effort language communities put into finding methods to keep their cultures and languages alive:

“They are not hearing only my voice, but also, the voices of generations and many more generations, of women, of men, and of children; the Ancestors whose flesh has perished, but whose voices are being heard at this moment, as I speak; because language is a stream of voices that the living must keep afloat and pass down to their children. If the stream dries out, the voices of generations and generations of people go silent.”

About the Language Vitality Initiative

With Indigenous and minoritized languages under threat, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Language Vitality Initiative supports community-driven language reclamation efforts. Our research promotes language use in new and traditional contexts and strengthens engagement in cultural heritage wellness. We work with digital and emerging media to promote unique voices and worldviews. We seek to educate new generations of community language practitioners and linguists through informal and formal workshops and institutes. All our work is used to educate majority-language users about the benefits of living in a multilingual world.

About the Endangered Languages Project

The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online space to share knowledge and stories, explore free learning resources, and build relationships to support Indigenous and endangered language communities around the world.

Hope for Reclamation: The Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program in Manitoba

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 03:53:00 GMT

The Indigenous Métis of the Canadian Prairies, through a heritage of travel and trade, speak many languages. Our unique language, Michif, evolved from a combination of French and Cree, with influences of Ojibwe. It is spoken in parts of Canada and the United States.

I was born in British Columbia. As an adult, I yearned to connect more strongly with my Métis identity. My father’s mother was the last first-language speaker of Michif in our family. As a result of her traumas in the Canadian boarding school system, where Indigenous children were punished for speaking their languages, my grandmother did not pass her Michif language to her own children. This is a common story among several generations of Indigenous peoples and one of the main reasons all Indigenous languages in Canada are endangered. Our country has been colonized by England and France; our children are growing up speaking only English and French.

In 2003, I started down the path of becoming a language revitalization activist after meeting with Elders Grace Zoldy and the late Rita Flamand, both speakers passionate about Michif. They encouraged me to move to Camperville, a remote village in Manitoba, to learn Michif with them. Who would have guessed I would end up marrying a guy from there!

I still live in Camperville with my husband, Orville Guiboche. After our years together here, I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I am happy to be close to my relatives. Orville’s late parents always encouraged me in learning and speaking the languages of our family—Michif, Cree, and Saulteaux. I enjoy the land and Lake Winnipegosis. In the spring, I gather seagull eggs and scoop suckers, a plentiful fish. In summer, I pick berries and medicines and grow vegetables and flowers in raised beds. In the fall I hunt, and in the winter I commercial icefish part-time with my husband. I am grateful to the Creator for our life, the land, and the lake.

Heather and Orville in their fishing boat on Lake Winnipegosis.

Photo by Laura Grant

Recovering my Michif language and teaching it to others as I go has been challenging. Still, it has given me many insights into how Indigenous languages can be learned and taught. I have worked with Elders and like-minded people to study linguistics, create Michif references and curricula, and bring community-based learning opportunities, such as the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program (MAP), to the surrounding area.

The current estimate of Michif speakers is around 100 individuals, with even fewer first-language speakers. Around Camperville, I hear the two dialects of Cree (Plains and Swampy), Saulteaux, and Michif spoken less and less. Few young parents speak these languages, and so few children are acquiring them at home. Others have shared similar observations about their own communities. I know that all Indigenous languages and “speech communities” across Manitoba are at risk—not just Michif. It makes me want to act to ensure our languages and our cultures continue to survive—and one day again thrive—in our schools, our communities, and especially in our homes.

In 2003, I identified the MAP (also called a Mentor-Apprentice Program) as an appropriate revitalization strategy for the Michif language in Manitoba. With Grace and Rita, I attended a MAP training in California with the program’s creators, the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. This led to a short-term pilot program that I started in Camperville both as a facilitator and an apprentice. In 2016, I attended the University of Victoria’s Masters of Indigenous Language Revitalization (MILR) Program in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. There I met many other Indigenous activist-scholars and our one American classmate, Laura Grant of Tehachapi, California. Laura has been with the MAP of California since 2003 as an instructor of immersion techniques and a coach to Elders and learners of California’s Indigenous languages.

Together Laura and I decided to reestablish a MAP in Manitoba. While in our last class at the MILR program, we acquired grant funding. In 2017, Michif speakers Verna Demontigny, Gail Welburn, and I co-founded what is now the incorporated nonprofit Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle to support long-term programming. Below, Laura locates herself in relation to our language work.

“Though I am not Indigenous, Norma Nelson, an Owens Valley Paiute Elder, first set me on this path in 1997 when I joined her language teaching efforts in Bishop, California. My role since meeting Norma has been to partner with language workers like Heather to implement strategies that focus on skills development for local people who will be practicing language reclamation over the long run.

The MAP was designed to address specific conditions. For example, the Owens Valley Paiutes had six Elder first-language speakers remaining in 1997, so it was urgent to enable new speakers quickly. Indigenous languages are passed along orally; typically community members do not use a written form. Language revitalization programs are supported by tribal organizations, not by state governments or public schools. Conditions are similar for the Metís in Canada except that first-language speakers still number in the hundreds. The methods of the MAP, as Heather had identified, could have a greater chance to effect change.”

The typical appearance of our workshop opening in the virtual world, 2022.

What Is the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program?

The MAP is a language immersion program. Immersion here refers to a learning experience during which learners hear and interact with speakers only in their languages, not the colonial/dominant language (like English). The MAP teaches people to create this experience for themselves in places where their languages are rarely heard or spoken anymore.

Learners acquire their languages informally through speech in context much like children do when they are exposed to their language at home: listening, speaking, asking questions, using gestures and non-verbal communication, and doing repetitive daily activities together. Neither grammar nor writing is formally taught. Languages are not taught through translation (for us, from English). The method follows Indigenous traditions of learning in which knowledge is passed by word of mouth through the generations.

The goal is to enable adults to become speakers who, in turn, may pass the language to others, especially as older first-language speakers become fewer and fewer. After receiving training, two people (often related)—a master (proficient speaker) and an apprentice (adult learner)—practice in their typical daily environments using one-on-one immersion techniques. They learn new habits to create and maintain the immersion setting. It is a simple idea but difficult to do! Even the most fluent speakers are in the habit of speaking, in our case, English and teaching through translation. The minimum recommended immersion hours are 900 over three years, about ten hours per week following the Ten Points of Language Learning from How to Keep Your Language Alive (Hinton, Vera & Steele, 2002), a “how-to” manual for the MAP.

The MAP of Manitoba

Between 2018 and 2022, Laura and I modeled the first MAP in Manitoba after the California program, which mentors teams for three years (variations exist in many places including Canada and Australia). Our Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle’s program serves not only Métis but also Anishnaabe (Ojibwe), Nēhiyawak (Cree), and Dakota peoples of Manitoba and beyond.

Apprentice Elvis Demontigny and master speaker Verna Demontigny created a Zoom video that introduced, in Michif, the implements and foods of their daily tea time.

Year One

We started our first cohort of ten teams, including myself and Grace, in the fall of 2018. In the first year and into the second, we gathered in person for intensive weekend training workshops twice a year. Two communities, Dauphin and San Clara, most generously hosted our workshops in their gathering places. We coached individual teams in person and our teams worked together face to face.

Our workshops open with a circle of introductions and reflections. There are often tears as speakers remember when they stopped using their languages, often under sad or humiliating circumstances, and when they made hard decisions to protect their children, to keep their languages from them. Often those children are apprentices, and they too cry at hearing these stories and having their language withheld from them.

People feel hope, too. They are being introduced to ways to reclaim their languages—so similar to traditional Indigenous ways that focus on hands-on and oral learning with Elders. Sometimes we cry then too. It isn’t a bonafide workshop until someone cries!

“The piece that has been missing for me and my language journey is working with a fluent speaker,” said Kate McDonald, Anishinaabemowin apprentice. “Immersion is the key to becoming a speaker.”

Intense emotions are tempered by the MAP learning activities, which are typically playful and fun: play acting, narrating wordless books, drawing, and using puppets, Play-Doh, and props from home—dishes, clothes, firewood. In MAP, we focus on speaking in the language without any use of English. Our teams learn language that you can use every day, like greeting others, asking and answering questions, giving directions, describing things and people, telling stories, praying, etc. Our languages carry our cultures, so doing traditional activities such as hunting, fishing, beading, and cooking brings our language and culture together.

We also give away recording devices and teach teams to use them and their own cell phones to create listening practice materials. Shared meals, music, and visiting are highlights after long days of intensive learning. Drop-in visitors and the curious are welcome to observe. Friendships are created. Teams network to sustain one another through a demanding, three-year learning journey.

Yeah Two: How We Overcome the Challenges of COVID

Then, in 2020, COVID impacted the world and, of course, our young program too. It was the middle of the second year for our first cohort of MAP teams. Traveling and in-person workshops were too risky for the Elders. We began to coach teams solely over the phone. A few were able to meet in person within their established “bubbles” of safety, but some stopped working. During this year, two Elder speakers passed away.

As whole countries began isolation practices to control the spread of COVID, many of us learned to use software such as FaceTime and Zoom to continue “meeting” together. Our funding organization agreed that our program could be adapted to use virtual meeting tools and granted us a project extension. Laura and I redesigned the program for fully remote training and master-apprentice immersion sessions. We hired Fineen Davis of Ontario to make sure the teams had the equipment, internet connections, and skills to use Zoom, hefty logistical challenges that required several months.

Year Three: Weekly Virtual Workshops

After this pause, we regrouped to begin Year Three. We opened our MAP to ten teams, some new and some veterans, all within our fully remote program. We switched from weekend workshops during which participants gathered for up to twenty hours of training to weekly two-hour sessions via Zoom.

As many of us have discovered, sitting in long virtual meetings can be tiresome! We limited workshop duration and then increased the number of times we met to provide the same amount of support. We used Zoom’s “breakout room” feature to give masters and their apprentices the opportunity to work independently. Often teams who spoke the same language worked in groups to foster community and build relationships.

While Laura and I presented the learning activities, Fineen was indispensable to coordinating our comings and goings during Zoom meetings and retrieving those who got “lost in space”! We found that this new method worked really well. It was thrilling to see and hear each other again after the first fearful year of the pandemic. Many of us had gotten COVID and recovered, but we lost many people in our communities, too.

Laura Grant teaches the use of the Zoom Q8 video camera during a Zoom workshop.

During the pandemic, a few of our teams lived in shared households, but most met only through technology. They used computers, tablets, and phones to practice immersion. The MAP relies on the concept of “learning through doing,” as well as non-verbal communication like gesturing and body language. Some of the techniques from before the pandemic worked well in this new virtual world too.

Hand-drawn and photographed action sequences could still be shared through camera “eyes” in their devices, so apprentices could ask for new language without translation from English. In the two examples below, apprentices used visual props to ask the masters how to say what was happening or how to give directions to someone else. We exchanged graphics such as these, written ideas, helpful web links, recordings of the workshops, agendas, and program forms in a shared Google Drive.

Gallery

A sequence using props to ask about describing the positions of things.

Photos by Laura Grant

A photo sequence of making a fire, which is part of the daily routine for many of our participants.

Photos by Julie Turner

We learned to interact with the “eyes” of our devices in ways that were fun and funny. We mailed typical MAP props such as puppets and wordless story books to masters and apprentices so they would have matching items to use. Puppets could still be used to model conversations and share some laughs.

Master speaker Carol Beaulieu and apprentice Kate McDonald getting creative with puppets on Zoom.

Teams invited each other into their homes using the eyes of their devices. In her kitchen and using a laptop, one apprentice gathered all the implements and ingredients to make stew while her master, in her own home, offered cooking lessons. Others “met” regularly for breakfast, each at their own tables.

Some teams got creative with ways to communicate and stay in the language that did not rely on text: sending audio messages, exchanging videos, or using apps like Marco Polo.

Marco Polo

Heather Souter speaks with Kate McDonald and Carol Beaulieu as they share their experience using Marco Polo.

In the virtual MAP, we continued to train apprentices to use recording equipment. Apprentices can use recorded immersion sessions to practice listening and speaking. We introduced best practices in community language archiving. Some used the recording feature in Zoom, and we also distributed video recording equipment. The tricky part is to make sure everyone has their equipment set in hand (with batteries charged!) before the workshops begin. Fineen again handled the logistics of purchasing and distributing many sets of equipment over our large geographical region. If you are going to try a virtual program like ours, a person in this role is critical.

Masters and apprentices had some apprehension about doing everything online. Verna and Elvis, who started the program in its original in-person form, shared their reflections about switching to working together remotely and how they got creative to resolve their challenges.

Carol and Kate, who joined the MAP only after it was a virtual program, also shared how they felt about working online. They describe how they took advantage of the technological innovations and opportunities devised during the time of COVID.

Kate McDonald

Kate speaks about how COVID affected her language mentorship experience.

Challenges, Innovations, and Successes

A great challenge that we faced presenting a virtual MAP was connectivity. People living in rural areas sometimes had unreliable internet access, which affected their ability to do their immersion hours and attend workshops. As presenters, too, we had to be ready to take over spontaneously should any of us suddenly blink out in the middle of a sentence.

Teaching any skill and adapting to your learners’ responses also relies on subtle non-verbal cues. During virtual workshops, we often found it difficult to read learners’ faces and body language to see if they understood or were engaged. The images of their faces were so small and often poorly lit. Sometimes all you could see was a forehead or a chin. Poor connectivity forced some people to turn off their cameras. It seems as though many Elders with vision and hearing loss also struggled sometimes to engage.

It took time and patience for everyone to feel comfortable and enjoy teaching and learning new skills that would bring the languages that they loved back into their lives. We had missed the company of friends so badly in the first frightening months of COVID. Our language work requires that we speak together! That was the true motivation for enduring the technology hiccups. Even so, not everyone found online programs appealing or suitable, so some people stepped out.

Yet our move toward a more technology-based program came with many wins. We provided training and coaching on MAP methods and built skills in language documentation, archiving, and communication. With travel challenges (picture the Manitoba blizzards of January!) and costs much less of an issue, we were able to bring together people who would otherwise be geographically or socially isolated or at great risk from COVID. We even welcomed workshop participants with new ideas from as far away as Australia!

Michif speakers Gail Welburn (left) and her mother, Grace Zoldy, with me (right), her apprentice, using Zoom.

The most obvious win: through the inventiveness and enduring good humor of our people, we were able to prevail during a worldwide pandemic! For that we are thankful. We can envision all the ways we can continue to reach out using the virtual version of the Master-Apprentice Program and to greatly enhance its traditional in-person presentation in days to come.

Now, in 2023, the Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle is continuing with the virtual version of its MAP. In a perfect world, the MAP would continue ticking away with spots assured for those who wish to keep their languages alive. However, our organization must acquire funding each year through competitive grants and partnerships; nothing is guaranteed. Funding opportunities often hinge on viewpoints about language reclamation of the national and provincial governments, those who initially colonized the Indigenous peoples of Canada.

Our organization has recently rented a house where some of our veteran Michif teams, including Verna and Elvis Demontigny, can be immersed in language together several hours a day. After their experience in the MAP, our hope is that masters and apprentices continue to expand their capacities to express themselves. We dream that they will carry their skills to convey and acquire language to their families and communities to be catalysts for healing and innovations in language reclamation.

Heather Souter is a learner-teacher of Michif based in Camperville, Manitoba. A long-time language activist and language revitalization practitioner, she runs the Prairies to Woodlands Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle, lectures at the University of Manitoba, and consults widely on language revitalization matters, including the use of language technologies for Indigenous languages. Fineen Davis and Laura Grant contributed to the article.

About the Endangered Languages Project

Iyasa Éboó: Youth Carrying Language Forward in Cameroon

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 05:00:00 GMT

My name is Sammy Mbipite, and I am from Beyo, a coastal village in the far south of Cameroon. I am Iyasa (pronounced “ee-ya-sa”), and I am a linguist, passionate about my language and culture. I am the oldest of seven children from a hundred-percent Iyasa family. I love my language, and I have always wanted to work to support the Iyasa community. I was the first and only one in my family to go to university, where I studied linguistics. There I found the desire, the love, and the will to find ways to work for my language.

In 2018, my colleagues and I had the idea of holding a youth training workshop on Iyasa language documentation and revitalization. Since then, our association, Iyasa Éboó, has grown into something bigger than just a workshop, and I would like to share this story with you all.

Why did we need this workshop? It is important to understand the current situation of the Iyasa language and people. Around the world, thousands of languages are in danger of falling silent. In most cases, this endangerment happens over generations: over time, children and young people stop speaking the language, until the only people left who can speak are elders, and then, one day, no one at all.

This is the situation we are facing with Iyasa. Iyasa is a minority, endangered, and under-documented language spoken on the coast in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. It is a Bantu language (the same family as Swahili, Lingala, and many other large African languages). Most speakers live in Cameroon in the Campo Subdivision, Océan Division, South Region. Iyasa doesn’t have a large speaker population. We have only 2,000 to 3,000 people who can still speak the language well. In most villages and towns, children are growing up speaking French, not Iyasa. Young people, from about age fifteen to thirty, are at the brink of this language endangerment. Many of them can understand Iyasa and speak it to some degree, but they mostly speak French.

So I dreamed of starting a program to work with young people, the ones who are beginning to lose our language, and safeguard our culture and language. It started in 2018 with an awareness-raising and training workshop on language documentation and conservation. With my colleagues, Arnauld Djowe and Anna Belew, I planned a two-week workshop (funded by the Endangered Language Fund) to teach young people the basic skills to document, read, and write Iyasa. Our aim was to empower them to reconnect with their language and culture and to give them a way to become involved with language work.

Other work has been happening for our language. A few years ago, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a Bible translating society, began a language development project called Comité d’Étude de la Langue Iyasa (CELI, or the Committee for the Study of the Iyasa Language). Through a great deal of work and dedication, CELI has developed an Iyasa alphabet booklet and a spelling guide, as well as a translation of some books in the Bible.

Despite the efforts and sacrifices made by some people, the general Iyasa population, especially young people, did not seem to join and participate in the CELI project. On the contrary, they felt sidelined, or even unwelcome. The work seemed to be only for SIL members, who were all elders, and who in turn felt that young people were irresponsible, insolent, and without any will or interest in language development. The intergenerational divide was palpable.

A jengú dance, an Iyasa tradition, held at Campo during Joba ja Iyasa (Iyasa Day) celebrations

Photo by the 2018 Joba ja Iyasa Committee

We wanted to make sure our program could make young people feel welcome. We especially wanted to empower them to choose how they worked on the language, instead of just telling them what to do. The first thing we needed was participants. In the month before the new youth workshop, Arnauld and I traveled around the Iyasa-speaking area, talking to parents and youths about this “summer school” and choosing seventeen young participants who were interested in Iyasa language and culture. We wanted to be sure we invited young people who were motivated and enthusiastic about learning, so that the workshop would succeed.

During this workshop, we discussed the state of danger their language was in, and the young learners took it to heart. They were moved to do something: they wanted to reconnect more with their language and work to protect it.

The students devoted themselves wholeheartedly to learning the methods offered by the workshop. These workshops included learning the alphabet and to write in Iyasa, how to use audio recorders to collect stories and knowledge, and how to use computers in order to transcribe and manage the data they collected.

None of the students had learned how to read or write Iyasa before, and they were thrilled to develop this skill. On the day we first learned the alphabet, they even ignored our lunch when it arrived, so they could stay in the classroom and practice writing Iyasa words on the chalkboard!

Hermine Prisca Bothe, practicing writing Iyasa during the 2018 workshop

Photo by Anna Belew

All of the students were also very excited to practice using computers. Some of them already had some computer skills, but others had little or no experience. Young people are always excited about technology, and these youths were no different. They learned all the computer skills much faster than we planned, and they were patient and kind with each other: more experienced students gladly helped the beginners with opening programs, using the mouse and keyboard, and so on. The students were truly committed to learning as a group, supporting their friends and classmates.

The whole workshop was a unique and captivating adventure. Every morning before the start of the session, someone came with a riddle or a question relating to the Iyasa culture. It could be an object for students to try to find its name in Iyasa or a traditional activity to describe. The students also challenged each other over the weekend to learn to make an Iyasa craft, like a raffia skirt, a toy boat with paddles, or a small traditional drum. Also, the learners returned home each day with homework and questions to ask their parents, grandparents, and neighbors, who gave them good information. They chose topics they were interested in, like traditional medicine, recipes, or songs, and made recordings with their family members. The motivation they brought to this work was even more beautiful. It gave the young people a chance to reconnect with their elder family members and have something to talk about and work on together.

“If we don’t do this, our children won’t be able to know what our ancestors did on earth,” Hermine Bothe, a participant in the workshop, said about her experience. “What I can say to other young people is to join the group so that they learn the little things that we too have learned.”

The workshop ended with a closing ceremony, to which all the parents and other relatives were invited, as well as the elder members of the language committee. We were a little nervous about this, since the language committee had been doubtful about youth getting involved in language work. But the elder members were proud of the work the youth had done and amazed at all they had learned. They did not fail to encourage and congratulate the initiative and the resulting project.

Mireille Mbango Sondo, Iyasa Éboó participant, hugs Daniel Epengo, president of CELI, as he presents her a certificate at the workshop closing ceremony

Photo by Arnauld Djowe

Touched and motivated by everything they learned during the workshop, the young students decided to form an association in order to be more effective within the community. They called it Iyasa Éboó (“Iyasa forward”). We started using the name to refer to our workshop as well. As a first concrete action, the students chose to unite their efforts to create a book on Iyasa traditional games.

“These games were already on the way out,” said Arnauld Ingride Djowe, president of Iyasa Éboó. “There are games that I knew when I was seven years old, and no one else is doing those games again. With the help of our promoters, our trainers, we are brought to remember our culture of our games which were already on the way to extinction. There are certain games that, when we redid them, I remembered those games that were already leaving, disappearing. So that’s a great gesture. I am very happy because these games today will no longer disappear. Our children, our grandsons tomorrow will recognize them through the documents that we are currently producing.”

To do this, it was necessary to seek the help and knowledge of the elders, because most young people today don’t know the traditional games. Unlike the earlier strained interactions between elders and youth at CELI, now the elders did not hesitate to help—quite the contrary! They gladly explained the different games, even helping them play the games in a concrete and practical way. It was one of the rare, but truly wonderful moments, when you could see real intergenerational communication and connection.

For the elders, the traditional games project offered nostalgia for their childhoods, but it also gave them real pleasure to bring their knowledge to the younger generation and to see them eager to learn more. The young people were proud to discover that there were such interesting things in their culture, like these games that made childhood happy and that brought the joy of being together.

Adolphe Idjabe II, secondary school teacher and member of CELI, encouraging the students during the 2018 workshop

Photo by Anna Belew

“These children deserve to be encouraged in what they are doing in this group of Iyasa Éboó,” said Adolphe Idjabe II, secondary school teacher and CELI member, who accompanied his younger brothers in the project. His interview was translated from Iyasa to English. “Why? Because they are the nursery that will help the others who come afterward learn the language, master it, and also understand the culture of our people.”

After the workshop ended, Iyasa Éboó continued. As the co-founder, I still mentor and supervise the students. Arnauld continued to organize meetings for the group at his home. Not only did the association continue, it grew! The students told their friends about what they had learned and the enjoyment of being together to learn about culture and language. Soon, the group had doubled in size, to thirty-five members. They also began hosting traditional game days at the beach, for young people to enjoy playing the games they were writing about, and spending time together speaking in Iyasa.

The Iyasa Éboó project was appreciated by the whole community but has still not reached the core of its objectives: namely, to see many young people producing books, video and audio recordings, and so on, in order to popularize and revitalize the Iyasa culture.

There are several reasons for this, but the main problem is poverty. All the young people come from poor families, and the search for daily bread is everyone’s priority. They are either students or fishermen. The problem of language development therefore becomes secondary, even though they are passionate about it. The poverty of the area causes other difficulties such as lack of access to printing, meeting space, and transportation between villages. And poverty feeds into the lack of confidence of some youth. Many young people do not take initiative because they are not sure of themselves; they do not feel up to it or do not believe they can achieve their goals. For many, this is because of their limited level of education.

We hope the book on Iyasa traditional games will therefore be a kind of catalyst, something motivating. When these youth see that all of their work is benefiting the community, and that they have created something amazing with the skills and knowledge they gained, they will begin believing in themselves more.

Arnauld Ingride Djowe, president of the Iyasa Éboó association, showing a craft he made during the 2018 workshop

Photo by Anna Belew

It was also important to bring elders and youth together, to heal the relationship between these groups. Elders have the experience and knowledge of the Iyasa people and culture but often do not have enough strength to use their practical knowledge, especially of things like games. Young people have the strength and energy but need the knowledge. Young people also have more skills in new technology, especially after the workshop. These technologies are inescapable, so we should use them in service of our language and culture. Working together is a great benefit for all. We can achieve so much more together than apart.

We want to encourage more collective and individual work initiatives to uplift Iyasa language and culture, and we believe Iyasa Éboó is a wonderful model—not just for the Iyasa community, but for all other youth around the world who want to promote and reconnect with their languages.

Sammy Mbipite is an Iyasa linguist who is passionate about his culture and language, and he is living in the traditional Iyasa way as a fisherman. He is co-founder of the Iyasa Éboó organization and holds a BA in linguistics and an MA in translation studies from Universite de Yaoundé I.

About the Endangered Languages Project