Chickasaw Nation: The Fight to Save a Dying Native American Language
▻http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/chickasaw-nation-fight-save-dying-native-american-language-1447670
In the US, 175 Native American languages are spoken, but fewer than 20 are expected to survive the next 100 years.
The language of the Chickasaws, known as “Chikashshanompa”, is a 3,000-year-old living language that is categorised by Unesco as being “severely endangered”.
The last remaining monolingual speaker of this language, Emily Johnson Dickerson, 93, died in December. Now the tribe is scrambling to make sure that its language does not become lost.
Dwindling native speakers
The Chickasaw Nation consists of 57,000 people, including 38,000 who live in 13 counties in Oklahoma, a state designated as the Indian Territory which boasts rich oil and natural gas preserves.
“There were over 3,000 speakers of Chickasaw in the 1960s,” Joshua Hinson, director of the Chickasaw Nation Language Department tells IBTimes UK.
“The last native speakers who learnt the language at home were born in the late 1940s. From that point on, with people leaving Oklahoma for other parts of the US, mandatory schooling and political pressures to be bilingual in English, the number of people dropped, and now, our youngest native speakers are in their 60s.”
There are now only 65 native speakers of the Chickasaw language who are also fully bilingual in English, and only four to five confident conversational speakers who are under the age of 35.