Myaamia revitalization and well-being

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas drew our attention to an inspiring story of language "resurrection": that of Myaamia, the language of the Miami tribe in USA. As  Lorraine Boissoneault says in the Smithsonian Magazine article, "Despite the threat of language extinction, despite the brutal history of genocide and forced removals, this is a story of hope. It’s about reversing time and making that which has sunk below the surface visible once more. This is the story of how a disappearing language came back to life—and how it’s bringing other lost languages with it".

But it takes time, as linguists David Costa and Daryl Baldwin know. Costa has already spent 30 years on reviving Myaamia, and we're told that he "anticipates it’ll be another 30 or 40 before the puzzle is complete and all the historical records of the language are translated, digitally assembled, and made available to members of the tribe". As a project that will probably outlive its initiators, the focus has to be on youth. One result of their work has been wide institutional collaboration: "From this initiative came National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. The workshop has been held in 2011, 2013, 2015 and is slated once again for 2017.... The workshop has hosted community members from 60 different languages already".

And the benefits of this revitalization are startlingly tangible!

To emphasize the importance of indigenous languages, Baldwin and others researched the health impact of speaking a native language. They found that for indigenous bands in British Columbia, those who had at least 50 percent of the population fluent in the language saw 1/6 the rate of youth suicides compared to those with lower rates of spoken language. In the Southwestern U.S., tribes where the native language was spoken widely only had around 14 percent of the population that smoked, while that rate was 50 percent in the Northern Plains tribes, which have much lower language usage. Then there are the results they saw at Miami University: while graduation rates for tribal students were 44 percent in the 1990s, since the implementation of the language study program that rate has jumped to 77 percent.

As the website of Healing Through Language summarizes: "One tool for improving health has become apparent in recent years: language. Communities that maintain their Native language have lower suicide rates. Elders often find renewed vitality when called upon to help the younger generations recover a language. Youths in language programs graduate from high school at higher rates than those who take a mainstream language like Spanish."