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The Dictionary I Read For Fun

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 John McWhorter | The New York Times | March 2, 2023

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Pablo Delcan

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Not long ago, a book that is truly a gorgeous thing, in all senses of the word, was published. It is a third and expanded edition of a full-length dictionary of the Native American language Lakota. And I mean full-length. The New Lakota Dictionary, compiled by the Lakota Language Consortium under the supervision of the linguist Jan Ullrich, is of the physical heft most commonly associated with brands like Webster and American Heritage. (There is also an online version.)

Lakota is primarily spoken in North and South Dakota. The closely related Dakota language is spoken there as well. Of the more than 300 Indigenous languages once spoken in the present-day United States — differing as much as English, Japanese, Hungarian, Thai and Indonesian do — the vast majority now are extinct as spoken languages or are spoken fluently only by people nearing the end of their lives.

Without serious efforts toward revitalization, dozens of them will become extinct a generation from now, according to an estimate in “Ethnologue,” which catalogs languages. Many of the groups, often assisted by linguists, seek to keep the languages spoken in some fashion. Of course, an important step is compiling dictionaries and descriptions of how their grammars work.

Compared with many Indigenous American languages, Lakota is doing rather well, with an estimated 2,000 native speakers remaining, according to the Endangered Languages Project, and this marvelous dictionary may help keep the number of speakers from falling. It gathers over 41,000 words and illustrates them with more than 50,000 sentences, usage notes and collocations.

Lakota is not my language of study, nor are other Native American languages. Yet partly because I am this strange thing called a linguist and partly because I am the kind of linguist who wants to know a little of every language on Earth, I have curled up with this book with a glass of wine countless times over the past couple of months just to savor the cornucopia that this dictionary is.

However, I must admit that one section of the dictionary gives me pause. For this edition, Ullrich has contributed a new section on the language’s grammar, and as expertly composed as it is, it’s hard to miss that Lakota, frankly, is hard!

I’ll give you just a quick sample. In a basic sense, the word for “I” is “wa.” Or more properly, it’s a prefix. So “made it” is “káǧe,” and “I made it” is “wa-káǧe.” If this were a language like English, that’s pretty much all you’d need to know about “I.” But the thing is that with many verbs, you have to jam “wa” into the middle of them. So “I found it” is “iyé-wa-ye,” not “wa-iyéye.” There’s more: If the verb is less about doing something than having an experience, then “I” is said differently, as “ma” instead of “wa,” also often jammed in the middle. “Tired” is “watúkȟa,” and “I am tired” is “wa-má-tukȟa.”

Lakota is like this throughout. But in the grand scheme of things, it is about as hard to learn as most of the world’s 7,000 languages. When it comes to grammar, English is on the easy side. You need just a single suffix, “-s,” to run through the present tense conjugation. There are no suffixes for the past, future or conditional that change for person and number the way they do in, for example, Romance languages. “I” stays the same whether you are doing something or experiencing it, and we certainly don’t plug it into the middle of other words.

But as the world’s languages go, English’s relatively streamlined grammatical nature is by no means the norm. Typically, a language makes you face either a boatload of prefixes and suffixes or, if not, then a lot of tones. To oversimplify, what this means is that a language tends to be like either Russian or Chinese. Lakota is more like Russian.

So if a typical language — i.e., one not like English — isn’t passed on from parents to their children but is learned in school and maybe starting only in the teen years or later, the signal has a way of weakening.

Researchers stipulate that the window on our ability to learn languages with native competence starts closing sometime during adolescence, because of biology or just the fact that you get busier and also shyer about making mistakes.

The result tends to be that beyond older speakers who grew up speaking only the tribal language or learned it alongside English from infancy, a new version of the language develops. Predictably, it is less grammatically elaborate. For example, I surmise that someone learning Lakota in school might not master exactly which verbs you slide the pronoun into, putting it instead at the beginning as one would feel comfortable doing when used to English. Also, vocabulary gets smaller. It is natural to sub in, for example, English words, especially for things most often encountered in English such as laptops and the kiddie goop called slime. You might even often sprinkle in transitional words like “anyway.”

This is the way new generations speak many threatened languages worldwide. It’s been documented in the case of Irish Gaelic, for example. In some parts of Ireland, younger people are certainly speaking it, but to a considerable extent, it could be said to be Irish in English, in which the quirkier Irish rules get flattened out in favor of rendering it the way you would in English. And the truth is that there is nothing wrong with this. We can see it as language changing, especially given that languages are always changing in countless ways, many of them because they’re being used alongside other languages. Languages in the same mouth will mix, unsurprisingly.

For example, my linguist friend Ghil’ad Zuckermann has assisted in the revival of an Australian language, Barngarla, which stopped being spoken in 1964. In his book “Revivalistics,” he notes that New Barngarla, inevitably, does not use some of the things that original Barngarla did. For example, Indigenous Barngarla pronouns were awesomely baroque: “Ngadlaga” means “we two” (but not “we three” or “we four”) and only when used by a mother and child or a man and his sister’s child (not his brother’s) and then only in a sentence that has an object. If there’s no object — as in “We two are sleeping” — then you have to use a different pronoun.

This distinction corresponded, in part, to the nature of kinship in Indigenous Barngarla society. But much has changed in Barngarla lives since then to force them into integration with white Australian society to a large extent, and making distinctions between pronouns like that naturally feels less urgent today. But what they are working with is still Barngarla; it sure isn’t English.

This might seem like a dilution or disintegration, but keep in mind that the language I am writing in is a lexically infected and grammatically streamlined version of Old English. King Alfred would find modern English alternately incomprehensible and barbaric. Many researchers think it got this way mainly because of what Viking invaders did to the language starting in the late eighth century, C.E. They spoke Old Norse, which was related to Old English but different. When they started using Old English, they probably spoke it as well as an American speaks Spanish after a few years of classes — functional, but just.

And they stripped Old English of its harder things, like vast tables of verb conjugations and noun declensions and the meaningless gendering of nouns of the kind that German imposes on “silverware.” It’s why English is the only standard language in Europe (other than, for instance, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian and Saami, which are not in the family that all the other languages belong to) that does not assign things to genders.

Then because of the Norman Conquest that followed the Vikings’ invasion, you can scarcely produce an English sentence without recourse to originally French words. Just in that last sentence there are eight (“because,” “Norman,” “conquest,” “invasion,” “scarcely,” “sentence,”“recourse” and “originally”). And the Vikings planted plenty of their own words, too. Without these new users, our word for “take” would be“nim,” our word for “knife” would be “sax,” and we would speak casually of being blithe rather than happy. I doubt anyone sees this as a problem. We speak our English; only the linguist calls it modern English, in salute to there having once been some earlier stage, which to us was a noble but bygone, “Beowulf”-y thing.

Revived languages today are going through a similar process, and the result will be more new versions of languages. A great many languages of the future will be structurally streamlined versions of their original form, but in the end, most of languages’ grammatical doodads are accidental accretions. They creep into a language and pile up over time, and somehow toddlers can wangle them and therefore do. But just as “silverware” doesn’t need to be gendered, full human expression hardly needs eight tones (in Hmong), four gradations of past tense, as in today, yesterday, a little while ago or just now (in Kikongo) or so many prefixes and suffixes that a single verb can appear in 1,502,839 forms (in Archi, a language of the Caucasus Mountains).

Lakota will likely change in the same way that many languages have. And that’s normal. In any case, in this succulent pot roast of a dictionary, the language lives, improvises and even beckons between the book’s covers. I salute Ullrich, the Lakota Language Consortium and the many, many native speakers they collaborated with for 1,420 pages of glory.

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An effort to revive the Lakota language comes to Manhattan this weekend

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 Arun Venugopal | Gothamist | February 22, 2023

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A woman reads from a Lakota Language textbook.

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New Yorkers rescue all manner of things – pets, people and lost things. This weekend, they have an opportunity to do something exceedingly rare: Help rescue a language.

The language is Lakota, spoken by the Native American people, and it is “dangerously close to extinction,” according to the Endangered Languages Project. It estimates just 2,000 people speak Lakota as a first language, primarily on reservations in North and South Dakota. That’s about 2% of the total population of Lakota people.

An effort in New York to revive the language includes a Lakota Language Weekend, Saturday and Sunday at the nonprofit American Indian Community House, 39 Eldridge St. in Manhattan. The course is described by the Lakota Language Consortium as a “deep dive” into the Lakota language, as taught by experienced instructors.

There is some urgency to the work.

Many living speakers, Alex FireThunder, the deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium, told Gothamist, are now in their 80s.

“Especially with the pandemic, we lost a lot of elders,” said FireThunder, who was raised upstate and now teaches the language in South Dakota. “The language has been in rapid decline because of colonialism, and so the work we’re doing in itself is a form of social justice.”

According to the Language Conservancy, 2,900 of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken across the world are now endangered. In 2019, the United Nations declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

“Many languages are today in danger of falling into disuse,” reads a 2021 report by UNESCO. “People’s ability and freedom to use their chosen language is essential for human dignity, peaceful co-existence, reciprocal action, and for the general wellbeing and sustainable development of society at large.”

Wil Meya, the CEO of the Language Consortium, estimated several dozen Lakota speakers live in New York City, making it one of over 600 languages in the five boroughs.

Efforts to revive languages like Lakota, said Meya, increasingly involved digital technology. For instance, his organization re-released an app that with more than 40,000 Lakota words serves as “the largest Native American dictionary in the world.”

“It’s instrumental in the language revitalization movement. Young people are using it all the time,” said Meya. “They’re saying it’s like having grandma or grandpa in their pocket.”

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Largest Native American Dictionary, New Lakota Dictionary, Unveiled

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Indian Gaming | December 23, 2022

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Deputy Director Alex FireThunder (left) with first language speaker Robert Two Crow (right) at the New Lakota Dictionary unveiling.

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KYLE, SD – The Lakota Language Consortium (LLC) has released the New Lakota Dictionary and an accompanying free app that enables Lakota speakers of all ages to hear the language spoken.

Native American languages have experienced declines at alarming rates, however, the Lakota people and linguists took action more than 20 years ago to start documenting the language out of concern for further decline. Accelerating the issue, the last generation of first language speakers are largely now in their seventies, and soon, younger generations won’t have access to their collective knowledge and wisdom.

“When it comes to preserving our language, the New Lakota Dictionary is a game-changer in so many ways,” said Alex FireThunder, Deputy Director of LLC. “It is an essential tool in how we can ensure our language is passed down from one generation to the next. The dictionary honors our ancestors and speakers and enables them to share our beautiful language with the next generation in a profound and enduring way.”

The New Lakota Dictionary was inspired by the early work of the first trained Lakota linguist, Ella Deloria, and was developed from the transcription of narratives and conversations with first language speakers. LLC used a rigorous method to corroborate words and phrases, resulting in a monumental encyclopedia, not only of language, but also of culture. Linguists used technology and software to accelerate the process as well as the creation of apps and other accessible tools.

“The New Lakota Dictionary exponentially expands the breadth and depth with which people can now express themselves in Lakota,” said Wil Meya, Executive Director of Lakota Language Consortium. “It demonstrates the power of technology, which enables us to fast forward the work, and art, of language preservation and revitalization. The app itself holds enormous power to connect youth with their heritage and vibrant Native language.”

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Mobile App to Preserve Lakota Language for Future Generations

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The Lakota Language Consortium released a new edition of its dictionary in an overhauled mobile app intended for use in Lakota reservation schools, as well as schools with a large Lakota community.

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Giovanni Albanese | Government Technology | December 22, 2022

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Looking to bring cultural tradition to a new generation through technology, a Native American nonprofit that works to preserve the language and culture of its people released a new digital edition of its dictionary through an overhauled version of its mobile app.

The hope of the New Lakota Dictionary — its third edition, first published in 2008 and again in 2011 — and the free accompanying app is to enable primarily the youth Lakota speakers to hear the language, thus preserving it for future generations, the South Dakota-based Lakota Language Consortium (LLC) said Monday in a news release.

The release said that the dictionary and app arrive at a time when the Lakota language, and Native American tongues as a whole, have been on a steep decline, dating back to the 1950s. Now, native speakers in their 70s and the Lakota youth aren’t getting the knowledge to continue the culture, the release said.

“The main goal is to make this reference tool accessible to Lakota language teachers and students in the schools in Lakota communities, as well as to autodidactic learners of the language,” LLC Deputy Director Alex FireThunder told Government Technology in an email. “This is the primary pedagogical material that educators and learners need for learning the language and helping to revitalize it.”

FireThunder, who also serves as an Oglala Lakota language instructor, said the dictionary uses consistent phonemic orthography, and unlike previous dictionaries, it is based entirely on authentic discourse recorded from native speakers. Native speakers were involved in the creation of glosses, definitions, translations of example sentences, as well as other parts of entries. Features of the layout and content match those of the most recent dictionaries for the world’s largest languages, he said. The new edition has 41,000 total entries, up from 23,000 in the second edition.

The app first launched in 2014 but received a complete overhaul as part of the new dictionary release. It uses lemmatization, which groups together different forms of the same word so the user can look up any of them in the same entry, and includes functions for searching for complex word forms within example sentences, comprehensive conjugation charts, recordings of native speakers pronouncing the entry words, and a full text search of more than 50,000 sentences, according to FireThunder.

He said the dictionaries, apps and software will be used in Lakota reservation schools, as well as schools with a large Lakota community, such as Rapid City and Sioux Falls in South Dakota, and Denver, Colo. He added that LLC needed to update the dictionary because previous versions were unreliable and inadequate.

“The main problems with the dictionaries had to do with inconsistent spelling and the use of non-phonemic orthographies — writing systems that do not sufficiently reflect the pronunciation,” FireThunder said. “Previous dictionaries didn’t gloss or define many words correctly and didn’t provide adequate coverage of the lexicon. None of the older Lakota dictionaries of significant size were actually done in close collaboration with native speakers.”

FireThunder said that many of the K-12 schools throughout Lakota country and in urban settings have made Lakota language education a priority, with some aiming to implement Lakota as the primary language of instruction. Most of the higher education institutions, colleges and universities in the state of South Dakota offer Lakota language courses, FireThunder said. He is confident the language and culture of the Lakota people will reach students from elementary schools through higher education.

“There continue to be challenges to language work within the education system, but there are many educators and administrators who are putting in the work to ensure that the language reaches our students,” he said.

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