How to Save a Language

Years ago I was teaching a series of basic Chamoru language classes for The Hurao School, what they call Eskuelan Mañaina. These are the classes that are required for parents of children in the Hurao after school, summer camp and now charter school. They have taken on different forms, and sometimes are attended by dozens of people, sometimes a handful of people. They goal has always been to encourage the parents of children in Hurao's programs to learn and use more Chamoru, to support their children who are also learning. It is one of the sad realities, that some children have been stunted in their language growth because after being immersed in Chamoru at Hurao, they return home and then are surrounded by English. 

Nowadays these classes are much more organized and sometimes are divided into different levels of learners, but when I was teaching some of them, it was everyone, fluent, not yet fluent, elders, all mixed together. Sometimes we were able to focus on lessons, drills, activities, other times it was too chaotic and some people were too advanced and others too beginner. 

During one class, we had finished up early and had some time before the end of class and so I took a moment to emphasize the need for those who could speak, to talk to those who can't. That's all we really need for the language to survive. At that time, things like ChatGPT weren't a thing yet, but people were still hoping for Google Translate and still asking for Rosetta Stones to be made. But I said, all we need is for each of you here who can speak Chamoru, to speak to someone or a few someones who can't. And the great thing is you are already related and connected through the school. There's already children learning in your family, so focus your Chamoru usage around that. 

A few people raised their hands to share stories about their families not speak Chamoru to them and elders talking about being punished for speaking Chamoru in school and how bad that was. I always think it is good to share these stories, but not as a conversation unto themselves, but as something that can help us understand about why the language isn't actively being passed on. We don't want to valorize the trauma and let that wound be the end of the story. We want to heal and move past it, but that means reckoning with the damage it has done and finding a way to repair what it did. 

After the class, a family approached me, three generations, a grandfather, a father and a child in Hurao. The grandfather spoke Chamoru to me and clearly loved using the language. The son couldn't speak Chamoru. The grandfather told me about how wonderful it was to be teaching the kids, how wonderful it was that I was speaking Chamoru and teaching Chamoru, and making the type of comment that I'm used to, where it implies that it is even more wonderful because I'm not really that Chamoru (because I'm only half-Chamoru and have a last name like Bevacqua). 

I complimented the family on having their children in Hurao and for teaching them Chamoru. It was clear that the son couldn't speak Chamoru and that neither could the grandson in Hurao. The grandfather would switch to English to talk to them and then back to Chamoru to talk to me. While he was promoting how we have to do all that we can to keep the Chamoru language alive, he wasn't noticing that some of his most modest efforts could literally begin within his own home, within his own family chat, with those standing beside him. 

I see this sort of thing all the time though. A blindspot. Celebration of the language in terms of asserting ones identity. Using the language in terms of expressing ones identity in a horizontal way to peers, but exempting oneself from the equation when it comes to inter-generational transmission, speaking it and using it in a way that it will be passed on to the future, not just be used to color and give texture to the present. 

This is one of the reasons why talking about what has led to language loss is so important, because it is not that the Chamoru language was silenced and disappeared. It is that its use became skewed and twisted in such a way, that it now trends towards silence. Chamoru speakers, such as this grandfather and so many others, may still gleefully use the Chamoru language in their lives, with their peers, with existing Chamoru speakers. 

But you don't use it with those who don't already know it, including your own children and grandchildren. The language has been deprived of value as something for future presence, for future use, for the future of the Chamoru people. That future of the Chamoru people was colonized, and even if someone is using Chamoru language every day, singing Chamoru music all the time, and wearing lots of Chamoru jewelry, they can nonetheless be ceding that future to English while speaking about how important the Chamoru language is the entire time. They can contribute to the silencing of Chamoru while singing J.D. Crutch along the way. 

Talking with Chamoru speakers about language loss is important. If you can illuminate the structure that has led to this reality where we can celebrate how amazing our language is and talk about how it should be preserved, while actively not using it with our children and not contributing to the next generation speaking it, especially within our own homes, then you increase the chances of helping them change their behavior, chance their linguistic choices. You can help them see the role that they can play in not just rhetorically celebrating Chamoru, but in actually using Chamoru with their descendants and therefore ensuring it will live on. 

I am thinking of this one particular exchange because the grandfather in the long and winding conversation proceeded to tell me he didn't think we should be talking about how people were punished for speaking Chamoru. We were speaking Chamoru but he switched to English to emphasize that "we shouldn't be stuck in the past and make excuses." He then pointed to himself that he was punished but he still speaks Chamoru and is proud to be Chamoru. We should just do it and not make any more excuses. 

Whenever I am faced with moments like this where what someone is saying so dramatically contradicts with their actions I am tempted to respond in more direct ways, even though. I know it might not be effective. For me this is what Dr. Ken Gofigan Kuper and I wrote about years ago, "The Beautiful Lie" when it comes to language revitalization. The idea that one can save the language by merely speaking about it in positive ways. By simply thinking happy thoughts, one can undo what has been done. That if we all talk about how important the language is, if we all talk about how language and culture are inseparable, then magically these words, this rhetoric, which can bring us to tears at times, will do the work that actually speaking or learning the language is required to do. 

I decided to go with the tactic of teasing and chiding, with a little bit of flattery. Telling the grandfather that he speaks great Chamoru, and asking him if he's using it with his son and grandson, with his whole family? I repeated it in English too so the son would have a chance to chime in. He quickly did noting that they all want to learn but the patriarch isn't teaching them. The grandfather tried to make excuses about them not really wanting to learn and so on. I didn't accept that, after all, we are in Hurao School, your family definitely wants to learn. So let's help them. Wouldn't it be great one day to have your grandson be speaking to you or you your son the way we are speaking right now? Siempre gof bonitoto no? Enao i malago'-ta mohon? That's what we want right? We can do it. 

What is the role of individuals, especially existing speakers in keeping our language alive? We will make apps, programs, books, have classes, websites, and do many other things, but while we have thousands of speakers, all of whom have families, alot of the vitality of the language remains with helping more and more of those speakers recognize their role, as not just standing on the sidelines of history as it happens. But playing an essential role in what the next generation looks, sounds and feels like.  

I don't know if that family has kept up with the learning of Chamoru. Now I have children in the Hurao Charter school and I haven't seen them around. I hope that they have continued though. I hope the grandfather was able to break down that wall that colonization created which made him feel like keeping the language alive is not his responsibility. Or that he didn't have a responsibility as a speaker and elder in his family to help his family learn.  

Below is an article that I saved years ago that when I was rereading it, reminded me of this exchange and so many others I've had with families over the Chamoru language through the years. 

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The fight to save CHamoru, a language the US military tried to destroy

Residents of the Mariana Islands are pushing to revive their indigenous language amid fears it might soon die out
Guardian UK
2/12/20

Bertilia Yamasta moves a pointer across letters of the alphabet decorating the wall of her classroom. She’s standing before more than a dozen kindergarten students dressed in green-collared shirts who squirm on the carpet as she leads them in familiar recitations. 

“A, å, b, ch, d,” the group says, calling out the alphabet backwards and forwards.

The students are speaking in CHamoru, the indigenous language of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific. And they’re among a shrinking number of people in the Marianas who actually know their ancestral tongue. 

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Yamasta’s class, at PC Lujan Elementary, is the first publicly funded CHamoru immersion school on Guam, the southernmost and most populous island in the archipelago. The program is part of a broader effort to preserve and revitalise the CHamoru, also spelled Chamorro, language, which like many other indigenous languages worldwide is at risk of disappearing. 

Rufina Mendiola, who leads the Guam department of education’s CHamoru studies program, says the class is still a pilot program but the plan is to expand it through fifth grade.

“We cannot just stop now. We need to look ahead,” she says.

Mendiola’s sense of urgency reflects the diminishing number of CHamoru speakers. Although there’s little data about how many people still speak CHamoru, it’s clear the language is vulnerable.

The Mariana Islands are divided into two administrative areas – Guam in the south, which is a US territory with a population of 165,000, and the Northern Marianas, which has a population of about 60,000 people and, like Puerto Rico, is a commonwealth of the US. 

A decade ago, the US census estimated there were about 25,827 CHamoru speakers on Guam, just 2,394 of whom were under the age of 18, and only 14,176 CHamoru speakers in the rest of the island chain.

Robert Underwood, the former president of the University of Guam, says most of the fluent speakers are likely to be over the age of 50.

“In another 20 to 30 years there may not be any real first-language speakers of CHamoru,” he says.

Underwood is leading a new effort to document the language backed by a $275,000 grant from National Science Foundation.

But even if the language survives, centuries of colonisation have already irrevocably changed it. The Mariana Islands spent more than 300 years under Spanish colonial rule. Today it’s far more common to hear CHamoru speakers use Spanish numbers to count rather than the traditional numeric systems. And many words have been lost, such as the names of some colours. 

Sacrificed on the altar of Americanisation 

American military rule on Guam in the first half of the 20th century further contributed to the language loss. The US navy passed an executive order in 1917 mandating CHamoru “must not be spoken except for official interpreting.” The naval government even set fire to CHamoru-English dictionaries. 

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the ban on speaking CHamoru in schools was lifted, says Michael Bevacqua, a CHamoru language educator on Guam. Until then, schoolchildren who spoke CHamoru were punished, and their parents were sometimes even fined.

Bevacqua says that after the second world war, many parents on Guam were afraid that teaching their children CHamoru would limit their chances of success in the US. 

“One of the things that they sacrificed on the altar of Americanisation was their language,” he says. That’s why today children like those in Yamasta’s class are a “novelty”. 

Ann Marie Arceo is determined to change that. In 2005, Arceo founded Chief Hurao Academy, a nonprofit that offers a CHamoru summer immersion program, an after-school immersion program and a CHamoru-language preschool.

Arceo says on the first day of registration, she expected 10 kids to show up. Instead, there were more than 200. The overwhelming interest reflects a a broader cultural renaissance in Guam, where there’s been a resurgence in pride in CHamoru history and identity.

“This millennial generation is wanting to know who they are and thirsting to fill an identity somehow,” Arceo says.

But creating fluent CHamoru speakers isn’t easy.

CHamoru language schools need funding, and that’s not always available. Federal funding recently expired for a similar language immersion programin the Northern Mariana Islands. 

Guam’s new immersion program has two years of funding, but getting the program off the ground is still challenging. At the start of the fall semester, Yamasta says her students were mostly quiet and unsure. A few knew very little CHamoru and one got frustrated to the point of tears. Yamasta felt overwhelmed translating lesson plans and looking for materials to help her teach effectively. 

But several months in, the children are constantly chatting in CHamoru. Every week Yamasta uses construction paper to make a new CHamoru-language book to help the kids read. She bought kid-sized kitchen and cashier sets so to help them practice useful vocabulary. Their parents attend weekly CHamoru classes themselves to help keep up the language use at home. 

On a recent afternoon, Yamaste watches as her class scrambles to finish addition and subtraction problems. 

One by one, the kids run up to her with their completed math worksheets and declare, “Esta manayan!” to indicate they’re finished. 

“Maolik,” she tells them, which means good. “It makes me so proud,” she says.