![]() Sangama recalls, "In the missionary school, they used to make us kneel on corn if we spoke Chamicuro." It's lonely being the last one." (Koop, 1999) Although family, friends, and neighbors know a few words, Sangama is the sole fluent speaker of Chamicuro when she dies, the language will be gone. Natalia Sangama, a Peruvian elder who lives in Pampa Hermosa, northeast of Lima, Peru, reveals: "I dream in Chamicuro, but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone. The former Soviet Union, with its policy of "Russification," all but wiped out many of its indigenous languages. Canada's 53 native tongues are rapidly disappearing. The European languages Polabian, Dalmatian, and Mozarabic have been relegated to the linguistic junkyard, as have Norn and Gothic. These situations are replicated in many places around the globe. If their language, Waimiri-Atroari, dies, they will have been forced to acculturate linguistically to survive. A similar number of monolingual inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia speak a language which is crucial to their survival yet instrumentally worthless to all but a few traders and administrators. Of the 3,200 Utes in Utah and Colorado, fewer than 500 are fluent in their native tongue. Hundreds of others, their speakers reduced to elderly members unable to transmit linguistic heritage to offspring, face similar obstacles. Others, like Comanche and Apache, are stalled into near extinction or death. Today, however, like Tilamook and Chitimacha, these languages have fallen by the wayside. At the time, linguists documenting Native American languages noted that people spoke Chumash and Tonkawa with the same healthy conviction that we use Spanish, French, or English. ![]() Atapaka, for instance, was on someone's lips one hundred years ago, as were Wyandot, Galice, Nootsack, Salinan, Twana, and Lumbee. ![]() With meanings that expand and contract, they can be popularized, bought and sold in a linguistic marketplace, or, if denied access, they can be forced off the conversational road, never to be heard from again.
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