{"id":215931,"date":"2026-04-30T21:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T21:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/215931\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T21:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T21:22:08","slug":"opinion-finding-new-horizons-and-saving-a-disappearing-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/215931\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Finding New Horizons and Saving a Disappearing Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sacagawea\u2019s native language was Shoshone. Fewer people speak the language now, and efforts are being made to keep it alive through classes and printed materials. Language revitalizations like this are the subject of the journalist Sophia Smith Galer\u2019s \u201cHow to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words<\/a>.\u201d Once a language is no longer being passed on to children, it is increasingly likely to go extinct. Galer visits and reports on nine languages that are in, or are threatened with, this situation.<\/p>\n

Galer casts a bright light on the massive linguistic diversity that the world seems set to lose, with about 3,000 of the world\u2019s 7,000 languages unlikely to see the next century. Often people don\u2019t even know that the languages are, well, languages. Galer starts with her mother and grandmother, Italian immigrants raising her in England and speaking among themselves both Italian and what they call \u201cthe dialect.\u201d They know no other name for it, but it is actually more like French, and Galer at first finds no information on it in print or online sources. In her grandmother\u2019s home village in northern Italy, she learns that it is Piacentino, no more like standard Italian than Spanish. Like countless other \u201cdialects\u201d in Italy and beyond, it is not long for this world as a spoken language.<\/p>\n

Every language that dies takes with it such fascinating stories. Galer notes that the Karuk language of Native Californians has at least 10 words for distinct varieties and uses of acorns and no one generic word \u201cacorn.\u201d In Jibbali, a relative of Arabic and Hebrew spoken in Oman, often some consonants are not actually pronounced but the tongue is placed as if they had been and you need to see it to know which word is being uttered. Understanding Jibbali requires watching as well as listening.<\/p>\n

Shoshone has interesting elements like that, too. In the 1978 cult hit musical \u201cOn the Twentieth Century,\u201d the lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green have a vainglorious theater producer dramatically bewailing that his creditors are like \u201cangry birds pecking with their beaks.\u201d I have always loved that overripeness \u2014 what else would the birds peck with, their tails? But then, all languages describe the world beyond what is necessary in some ways, and in Shoshone, it is normal to say something like \u201cpeck with its beak,\u201d where the \u201cwith the beak\u201d part is conveyed as a prefix to \u201cpeck.\u201d It makes the verbs magnificently precise. You not only \u201cbite with your mouth\u201d and \u201ckick with your foot,\u201d but you can get more specific. We don\u2019t have one word that means \u201cbreak with your foot\u201d \u2014 as in, breaking the glass at a Jewish wedding \u2014 but Shoshone does. There is even a word that means \u201cjam yourself into a hole butt-first\u201d!<\/p>\n

I wish the people keeping Shoshone alive well. However, I\u2019m sure they know that the version of their language they bring back from the brink will be different from the original. Usually, a language that was down for the count but comes back is slimmed down from the journey. Kids can learn a language of fearsome complexity, but when adults are doing a lot of the learning, they tend to iron out the irregularities and take shortcuts around the more pitiless intricacies. This has happened with the kind of Irish most people speak today, and other languages. I hope Shoshone can hold on to as many of those nifty prefixes as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sacagawea\u2019s native language was Shoshone. Fewer people speak the language now, and efforts are being made to keep…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[85188,85185,85184,85183,1768,9,11,10,85186,85187],"class_list":["post-215931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-charles-m","tag-english-language","tag-exploration-and-explorers","tag-language-and-languages","tag-native-americans","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-sacagawea","tag-schulz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}