essay native language

• Social Media

The Importance of Maintaining Native Language

The United States is often proudly referred to as the “melting pot.” Cultural diversity has become a part of our country’s identity. However, as American linguist, Lilly Wong Fillmore, pointed out in her language loss study, minority languages remain surprisingly unsupported in our education system (1991, p. 342). Although her research was conducted more than twenty years ago, this fact still rings true. Many non-minority Americans are not aware of the native language loss that has become prevalent in children of immigrant parents. While parents can maintain native language, children educated in U.S. schools quickly lose touch with their language heritage. This phenomenon, called subtractive bilingualism, was first discovered by psychologist Wallace Lambert, in his study of the language acquisition of French-Canadian children. The term refers to the fact that learning a second language directly affects primary language, causing loss of native language fluency (Fillmore, 1991, p. 323). This kind of language erosion has been integral to the narrative of this country for some time. Many non-minority Americans can trace their family tree back to a time when their ancestors lost fluency in a language that was not English. Today, due to the great emphasis on assimilation into the United States’ English-speaking culture, children of various minorities are not only losing fluency, but also their ability to speak in their native language, at all (Fillmore, 1991, p. 324).

The misconceptions surrounding bilingual education has done much to increase the educational system’s negative outlook on minority languages. In Lynn Malarz’s bilingual curriculum handbook, she states that “the main purpose of the bilingual program is to teach English as soon as possible and integrate the children into the mainstream of education” (1998). This handbook, although written in 1998, still gives valuable insight into how the goals of bilingual education were viewed. Since English has become a global language, this focus of bilingual education, which leads immigrant children to a future of English monolingualism, seems valid to many educators and policymakers. Why support minority languages in a country where English is the language of the prosperous? Shouldn’t we assimilate children to English as soon as possible, so that they can succeed in the mainstream, English-speaking culture? This  leads us to consider an essential question: does language loss matter? Through the research of many linguists, psychologists, and language educators, it has been shown that the effect of native language loss reaches far. It impacts familial and social relationships, personal identity, the socio-economic world, as well as cognitive abilities and academic success. This paper aims to examine the various benefits of maintaining one’s native language, and through this examination, reveal the negative effects of language loss.

Familial Implications

The impact of native language loss in the familial sphere spans parent-child and grandparent-grandchild relationships, as well as cultural respects. Psychologists Boutakidis, Chao, and Rodríguez, (2011) conducted a study of Chinese and Korean immigrant families to see how the relationships between the 9th-grade adolescences and their parents were impacted by native language loss. They found that, because the adolescents had limited understanding and communicative abilities in the parental language, there were key cultural values that could not be understood (Boutakidis et al., 2011, p. 129). They also discovered there was a direct correlation between respect for parents and native language fluency. For example, honorific titles, a central component of respect unique to Chinese and Korean culture, have no English alternatives (p.129). They sum up their research pertaining to this idea by stating that “children’s fluency in the parental heritage language is integral to fully understanding and comprehending the parental culture” (Boutakidis et al., 2011, p. 129). Not only is language integral to maintaining parental respect, but also cultural identity.

In her research regarding parental perceptions of maintaining native language, Ruth Lingxin Yan (2003) found that immigrant parents not only agree on the importance of maintaining native language, but have similar reasoning for their views. She discovered that maintaining native language was important to parents, because of its impact on heritage culture, religion, moral values, community connections, and broader career opportunities.

Melec Rodriguez, whose parents immigrated to the United States before he was born, finds that his native language loss directly impacts his relationship with his grandparents. Rodriguez experienced his language loss in high school. He stated that due to his changing social group and the fact that he began interacting with his family less, he found himself forgetting “uncommon words in the language.” His “struggle to process information” causes him to “take a moment” to “form sentences in [his] mind during conversations” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019). Of his interactions with his grandparents, who have a limited understanding of English, he stated:

“I find very often that I simply cannot think of a way to reply while conveying genuine emotion, and I know they feel I am detached at times because of that. I also struggle to tell exciting stories about my experiences and find it hard to create meaningful conversations with family” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019).

Rodriguez’s native language loss creates a distinct communicative barrier between him and his grandparents, causing him difficulty in genuine connection building. Although this is a relatively obvious implication of native language loss, it is nonetheless a concerning effect.

Personal Implications

Native language, as an integral part of the familial sphere, also has strong connections on a personal level. The degree of proficiency in one’s heritage language is intrinsically connected to self-identity. The Intercultural Development Research Association noted this connection, stating that “the child’s first language is critical to his or her identity. Maintaining this language helps the child value his or her culture and heritage, which contributes to a positive self-concept. (“Why Is It Important to Maintain the Native Language?” n.d.). Grace Cho, professor and researcher at California State University, concluded “that [heritage language] development can be an important part of identity formation and can help one retain a strong sense of identity to one's own ethnic group” (Cho, 2000, p. 369). In her research paper, she discussed the “identity crisis” many Korean American students face, due to the lack of proficiency they have in their heritage language (p. 374). Cho found that students with higher levels of fluency could engage in key aspects of their cultural community, which contributed greatly to overcoming identity crises and establishing their sense of self (p. 375).

Social Implications

Native language loss’ connections to family relationships and personal identity broaden to the social sphere, as well. Not only can native language loss benefit social interactions and one’s sense of cultural community, it has large-scale socioeconomic implication. In Cho’s study (2000) she found that college-aged participants with Korean ancestry were faced with many social challenges due to limited fluency in Korean. Participants labeled with poor proficiency remarked on the embarrassment they endured, leading them to withdraw from social situations that involved their own ethnic group (p. 376). These students thus felt isolated and excluded from the heritage culture their parents actively participated in. Native language loss also caused students to face rejection from their own ethnic communities, resulting in conflicts and frustration (p. 377). Participants that did not complain of any conflict actively avoided their Korean community due to their lack of proficiency (p. 378). Participants who were labeled as highly proficient in Korean told of the benefits this had, allowing them to “participate freely in cultural events or activities” (p. 374). Students who were able to maintain their native language were able to facilitate meaningful and beneficial interactions within their cultural community.

Melec Rodriguez made similar comments in his experience as a Spanish and English- speaking individual. Although his native language loss has negatively affected his familial relationships, he has found that, in the past, his Spanish fluency “allowed for a greater social network in [his] local community (school, church, events) as [he] was able to more easily understand and converse with others” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019). As this research suggests, native language fluency has a considerate influence on social interactions. Essentially, a lack of fluency in one’s native language creates a social barrier; confident proficiency increases social benefits and allows genuine connections to form in one’s cultural community.

Benefits to the Economy

Maintaining native language not only benefits personal social spheres, but also personal career opportunities, and thereby the economy at large. Peeter Mehisto and David Marsh (2011), educators central to the Content and Language Integrated Learning educational approach, conducted research into the economic implications of bilingualism. Central to their discussion was the idea that “monolingualism acts as a barrier to trade and communication” (p. 26). Thus, bilingualism holds an intrinsic communicative value that benefits the economy. Although they discovered that the profits of bilingualism can change depending on the region, they referred to the Fradd/Boswell 1999 report, that showed Spanish and English-speaking Hispanics living in the United States earned more than Hispanics who had lost their Spanish fluency (Mehisto & Marsh, 2011, p. 22). Mehisto and Marsh also found that bilingualism makes many contributions to economic growth, specifically “education, government, [and] culture…” (p. 25). Bilingualism is valuable in a society in which numerous services are demanded by speakers of non-English languages. The United States is a prime example of a country in which this is the case.

Increased Job Opportunites

Melec Rodriguez, although he has experienced native language loss, explained that he experienced increased job opportunities due to his Spanish language background. He stated:

“Living in south Texas, it is very common for people to struggle with either English or Spanish, or even be completely unable to speak one of the languages. There are many restaurants or businesses which practice primarily in one language or the other. Being bilingual greatly increased the opportunity to get a job at many locations and could make or break being considered as a candidate” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019).

Rodriguez went on to explain that if he were more confident in his native language, he would have been able to gain even more job opportunities. However, as his language loss has increased through the years, Spanish has become harder to utilize in work environments. Thus, maintaining one’s native language while assimilating to English is incredibly valuable, not only to the economy but also to one’s own occupational potential.

Cognitive and Academic Implications

Those who are losing native language fluency due to English assimilation are missing out on the cognitive and academic benefits of bilingualism. The Interculteral Development Research Association addresses an important issue in relation to immigrant children and academic success. When immigrant children begin at U. S. schools, most of their education is conducted in English. However, since these students are not yet fluent in English, they must switch to a language in which they function “at an intellectual level below their age” (“Why Is It Important to Maintain the Native Language?” n.d.). Thus, it is important that educational systems understand the importance of maintaining native language. It is also important for them to understand the misconceptions this situation poses for the academic assessments of such students.

In Enedina Garcia-Vazquez and her colleague's (1997) study of language proficiency’s connection to academic success, evidence was found that contradicted previous ideas about the correlation. The previous understanding of bilingualism in children was that it caused “mental confusion,” however, this was accounted for by the problematic methodologies used (Garcia- Vazquez, 1997, p. 395). In fact, Garcia-Vazquez et al. discuss how bilingualism increases “reasoning abilities” which influence “nonverbal problem-solving skills, divergent thinking skills, and field independence” (p. 396). Their study of English and Spanish speaking students revealed that proficiency in both languages leads to better scores on standardized tests (p. 404). The study agreed with previous research that showed bilingual children to exceed their monolingual peers when it came to situations involving “high level…cognitive control” (p. 396). Bilingualism thus proves to have a distinct influence on cognitive abilities.

Mehisto and Marsh (2011) discuss similar implications, citing research that reveals neurological differences in bilingual versus monolingual brains. This research indicates that the “corpus callosum in the brain of bilingual individuals is larger in area than is the case for monolinguals” (p. 30). This proves to be an important difference that reveals the bilingual individual’s superiority in many cognitive functions. When it comes to cognitive ability, Mehisto and Marsh discuss how bilinguals are able to draw on both languages, and thus “bring extra cognitive capacity” to problem-solving. Not only can bilingualism increase cognitive abilities, but it is also revealed to increase the “cognitive load” that they are able to manage at once (p.30). Many of the academic benefits of bilingualism focus on reading and writing skills. Garcia-Vazquez’s study focuses on how students who were fluent in both Spanish and English had superior verbal skills in both writing and reading, as well as oral communication (p. 404). However, research indicates that benefits are not confined to this area of academics. Due to increased cognition and problem-solving skills, research indicates that bilingual individuals who are fluent in both languages achieved better in mathematics than monolinguals, as well as less proficient bilinguals (Clarkson, 1992). Philip Clarkson, a mathematics education scholar, conducted one of many studies with students in Papua New Guinea. One key factor that Clarkson discovered was the importance of fluency level (p. 419). For example, if a student had experienced language loss in one of their languages, this loss directly impacted their mathematical competence. Not only does Clarkson’s research dissuade the preconceived notions that bilingualism gets in the way of mathematical learning, it actually proves to contribute “a clear advantage” for fluent bilingual students (p. 419). Clarkson goes on to suggest that this research disproves “the simplistic argument that has held sway for so long for not using languages other than English in Papua New Guinea schools” (p. 420). He thus implies the importance of maintaining the native language of the students in Papua New Guinea since this bilingual fluency directly impacts mathematical competency.

Both Garcia-Vazquez et al. and Mehisto and Marsh reveal how proficiency in two languages directly benefits a brain’s functions. Their research thus illustrates how maintaining one’s native language will lead to cognitive and academic benefits. Clarkson expands on the range of academic benefits a bilingual student might expect to have. It is important to note that,  as Clarkson’s research showed, the fluency of a bilingual student has much influence on their mathematical abilities. Thus, maintaining a solid fluency in one’s native language is an important aspect of mathematical success.

Suggested Educational Approach

The acculturation that occurs when immigrants move to the United States is the main force causing language loss. Because of the misconceptions of bilingual education, this language loss is not fully counteracted. Policymakers and educators have long held the belief that bilingual education is essentially a “cop-out” for immigrants who do not wish to assimilate to the United States’ English-speaking culture (Fillmore, 1991, p. 325). However, bilingual education is  central to the maintenance of native language. Due to the misconceptions and varied views on this controversial subject, there are two extremes of bilingual education in the United States. In Malarz’s (1998) curriculum handbook, she explains the two different viewpoints of these approaches. The first pedological style’s goal is to fully assimilate language-minority students to English as quickly and directly as possible. Its mindset is based on the idea that English is the language of the successful, and that by teaching this language as early as possible, language- minority children will have the best chance of prospering in mainstream society. However, this mindset is ignorant of the concept of subtractive bilingualism, and thus is not aware that its approach is causing native language loss. The second approach Malarz discusses is the bilingual education that places primary importance on retaining the student’s heritage culture, and thereby, their native language. This approach faces much criticism ,since it seems to lack the appropriate focus of a country that revolves around its English-speaking culture. Neither of these approaches poses a suitable solution to the issue at hand. Maintaining native language, as we have discussed, is extremely valuable. However, learning English is also an important goal for the future of language-minority students. Thus, the most appropriate bilingual educational approach is one of  careful balance. Native language, although important, should not be the goal, just as English assimilation should not be the central focus. Instead, the goal of bilingual education should be to combine the two former goals and consider them as mutually inclusive. This kind of balanced education is certainly not mainstream, although clearly needed. In Yan’s research regarding parental perceptions of maintaining native language, she found that parents sought after “bilingual schools or those that provided instruction with extra heritage language teaching” (2003, p. 99). Parents of language-minority students recognize the importance of this kind of education and educators and policymakers need to, as well.

The ramifications of native language loss should not be disregarded. Unless bilingual children are actively encouraged and assisted by parents and teachers to maintain their native language, these children will lose their bilingualism. They will not only lose their native fluency and the related benefits, but they will also experience the drawbacks associated with language loss. As the research presented in this article illustrates, there are several specific advantages to maintaining native language. The familial implications reveal that native language loss is detrimental to close relationships with parents and grandparents. Maintaining native language allows for more meaningful communication that can facilitate respect for these relationships as well as heritage culture as a whole. Native language maintenance is also an important factor in the retainment of personal identity. In regard to the social sphere, isolation and a feeling of rejection can occur if native language is not maintained. Additionally, it was found that maintaining native language allows for greater involvement in one’s cultural community. Other social factors included the benefits of bilingualism to the economy as well as the greater scope of job opportunities for bilingual individuals. A variety of studies concluded that there are many cognitive and academic benefits of retaining bilingualism. Due to the many effects of native language loss and the variety of benefits caused by maintaining native language, it can be determined that native language retainment is incredibly important.

Boutakidis, I. P., Chao, R. K., & Rodríguez, J. L. (2011). The role of adolescent’s native language fluency on quality of communication and respect for parents in Chinese and Korean immigrant families. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 2(2), 128–139. doi: 10.1037/a0023606.

Cho, G. (2000). The role of heritage language in social interactions and relationships: Reflections from a language minority group. Bilingual Research Journal, 24(4), 369-384. doi:10.1080/15235882.2000.10162773

Clarkson, P. C. (1992). Language and mathematics: A comparison of bilingual and monolingual students of mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 23(4), 417.

Fillmore, L. W. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(3), 323–346. doi: 10.1016/s0885-2006(05)80059-6

Garcia-Vazquez, E., Vazquez, L. A., Lopez, I. C., & Ward, W. (1997). Language proficiency and academic success: Relationships between proficiency in two languages and achievement among Mexican American students. Bilingual Research Journal, 21(4), 395.

Malarz, L. (1998). Bilingual Education: Effective Programming for Language-Minority  Students. Retrieved November 10, 2019, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/curriculum_handbook/413/chapters/Biling... n@_Effective_Programming_for_Language-Minority_Students.aspx .

Mehisto, P., & Marsh, D. (2011). Approaching the economic, cognitive and health benefits of bilingualism: Fuel for CLIL. Linguistic Insights - Studies in Language and Communication, 108, 21-47.

Rodriguez, M. (2019, November 3). Personal interview.

Why is it Important to Maintain the Native Language? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.idra.org/resource-center/why-is-it-important-to-maintain-the... language/.

Yan, R. (2003). Parental Perceptions on Maintaining Heritage Languages of CLD Students.

Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe, 27(2), 99-113. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25745785

Essays About Language: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Language is the key to expressive communication; let our essay examples and writing prompts inspire you if you are writing essays about language.

When we communicate with one another, we use a system called language. It mainly consists of words, which, when combined, form phrases and sentences we use to talk to one another. However, some forms of language do not require written or verbal communication, such as sign language. 

Language can also refer to how we write or say things. For example, we can speak to friends using colloquial expressions and slang, while academic writing demands precise, formal language. Language is a complex concept with many meanings; discover the secrets of language in our informative guide.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. a global language: english language by dallas ryan , 2. language and its importance to society by shelly shah, 3. language: the essence of culture by kelsey holmes.

• 4.  Foreign Language Speech by Sophie Carson
• 5. ​​Attitudes to Language by Kurt Medina

1. My Native Language

2. the advantages of bilingualism, 3. language and technology, 4. why language matters, 5. slang and communication, 6. english is the official language of the u.s..

“Furthermore, using English, people can have more friends, widen peer relationships with foreigners and can not get lost. Overall, English becomes a global language; people may have more chances in communication. Another crucial advantage is improving business. If English was spoken widespread and everyone could use it, they would likely have more opportunities in business. Foreign investments from rich countries might be supported to the poorer countries.”

In this essay, Ryan enumerates both the advantages and disadvantages of using English; it seems that Ryan proposes uniting the world under the English language. English, a well-known and commonly-spoken language can help people to communicate better, which can foster better connections with one another. However, people would lose their native language and promote a specific culture rather than diversity. Ultimately, Ryan believes that English is a “global language,” and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages

“Language is a constituent element of civilization. It raised man from a savage state to the plane which he was capable of reaching. Man could not become man except by language. An essential point in which man differs from animals is that man alone is the sole possessor of language. No doubt animals also exhibit certain degree of power of communication but that is not only inferior in degree to human language, but also radically diverse in kind from it.”

Shah writes about the meaning of language, its role in society, and its place as an institution serving the purposes of the people using it. Most importantly, she writes about why it is necessary; the way we communicate through language separates us as humans from all other living things. It also carries individual culture and allows one to convey their thoughts. You might find our list of TOEFL writing topics helpful.

“Cultural identity is heavily dependent on a number of factors including ethnicity, gender, geographic location, religion, language, and so much more.  Culture is defined as a “historically transmitted system of symbols, meanings, and norms.”  Knowing a language automatically enables someone to identify with others who speak the same language.  This connection is such an important part of cultural exchange”

In this short essay, Homes discusses how language reflects a person’s cultural identity and the importance of communication in a civilized society. Different communities and cultures use specific sounds and understand their meanings to communicate. From this, writing was developed. Knowing a language makes connecting with others of the same culture easier. 

4.   Foreign Language Speech by Sophie Carson

“Ultimately, learning a foreign language will improve a child’s overall thinking and learning skills in general, making them smarter in many different unrelated areas. Their creativity is highly improved as they are more trained to look at problems from different angles and think outside of the box. This flexible thinking makes them better problem solvers since they can see problems from different perspectives. The better thinking skills developed from learning a foreign language have also been seen through testing scores.”

Carson writes about some of the benefits of learning a foreign language, especially during childhood. During childhood, the brain is more flexible, and it is easier for one to learn a new language in their younger years. Among many other benefits, bilingualism has been shown to improve memory and open up more parts of a child’s brain, helping them hone their critical thinking skills. Teaching children a foreign language makes them more aware of the world around them and can open up opportunities in the future.

5. ​​ Attitudes to Language by Kurt Medina

“Increasingly, educators are becoming aware that a person’s native language is an integral part of who that person is and marginalizing the language can have severe damaging effects on that person’s psyche. Many linguists consistently make a case for teaching native languages alongside the target languages so that children can clearly differentiate among the codes”

As its title suggests, Medina’s essay revolves around different attitudes towards types of language, whether it be vernacular language or dialects. He discusses this in the context of Caribbean cultures, where different dialects and languages are widespread, and people switch between languages quickly. Medina mentions how we tend to modify the language we use in different situations, depending on how formal or informal we need to be. 

6 Prompts for Essays About Language

In your essay, you can write about your native language. For example, explain how it originated and some of its characteristics. Write about why you are proud of it or persuade others to try learning it. To add depth to your essay, include a section with common phrases or idioms from your native language and explain their meaning.

Bilingualism has been said to enhance a whole range of cognitive skills, from a longer attention span to better memory. Look into the different advantages of speaking two or more languages, and use these to promote bilingualism. Cite scientific research papers and reference their findings in your essay for a compelling piece of writing.

In the 21st century, the development of new technology has blurred the lines between communication and isolation; it has undoubtedly changed how we interact and use language. For example, many words have been replaced in day-to-day communication by texting lingo and slang. In addition, technology has made us communicate more virtually and non-verbally. Research and discuss how the 21st century has changed how we interact and “do language” worldwide, whether it has improved or worsened. 

We often change how we speak depending on the situation; we use different words and expressions. Why do we do this? Based on a combination of personal experience and research, reflect on why it is essential to use appropriate language in different scenarios.

Different cultures use different forms of slang. Slang is a type of language consisting of informal words and expressions. Some hold negative views towards slang, saying that it degrades the language system, while others believe it allows people to express their culture. Write about whether you believe slang should be acceptable or not: defend your position by giving evidence either that slang is detrimental to language or that it poses no threat.

English is the most spoken language in the United States and is used in government documents; it is all but the country’s official language. Do you believe the government should finally declare English the country’s official language? Research the viewpoints of both sides and form a conclusion; support your argument with sufficient details and research. 

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our guide on how to write an essay about diversity .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

View all posts

Native Language and Its Role in a Person’ Life Essay

Introduction, native language, works cited.

Language is not just the means for expressing ideas and sharing information. It is something bigger. Speaking specific languages people acquire particular culture, they become the part of it. That is why, when people have to leave the places they were born in, they keep language they got used to speak as something the most valuable and sacred. It is impossible to take all the things when leaving to the strange culture, but it is possible to have native language and use it whenever one wants.

Reading Agosin’s article Always Living in Spanish: Recovering the Familiar, through Language I faced a quote, “I miss that undulating and sensuous language of mine, those baroque descriptions, the sense of being and felling that Spanish gives me” (Agosin 203) and I have understood that it is about me. Spanish is not my native language, but it seems that the author speaks about Russian, my native language.

I want to say that even though my English is good, I can express ideas and people understand me in a proper way, I feel like I am singing when I speak my native language. It is easier for me to speak Russian when I want to express emotions. I sometimes feel that I really miss my native language, the one which I have been using for many years before I moved here, to the USA.

I do not want to say that I have problems with reading or communicating in English, it is just different. It seems to me that when I speak my native language, I recollect the memories about my childhood. Furthermore, there are a lot of different poems in English which touch my heart, but when I read poetry in my native language, it seems to me that each word is full of emotions, traditions and culture I used to.

Turning the discussion to the literature and tradition, it is impossible to deny that such notions are closely connected. For example, the poetry of Sergei Yesenin is the description of the pastoral Russia. Each word in his poems is full the smell of meadows, fields, trees, flowers, rivers, etc. Yesenin’s poems are not only about Russia, they are for Russia, the place he was born and died. Alexander Pushkin is another representative of Russian literature.

I would like to say that asking foreigners about Russian poets and writers they know, they will definitely remember Pushkin. The works of these poets remind me what Russia is. It does not matter for me that Pushkin wrote during Romantic era and Yesenin was a representative of 20 th century literature. The nature they describe has not changed (if not to take into account raised cities), as the villages and the forests they describe are full of Russian spirit.

Reading these poets in English translation I cannot experience these feeling of national identity. Only using Russian books for reading, it seems to me that I appear in my native country. Close connection between books and culture cannot be denied as they have been written by the people who were brought us by the same social norms and traditions. Thus, it is possible to conclude that language and traditions are closely connected and even these notions are a part of the culture of the whole nation.

Touching the issue of tradition and language, it is possible to provide an example using the following words, “Let me explain why we haven’t adopted English as our official family language. For me and most of the bilingual people I know, it’s a matter of respect for our parents and comfort in our cultural roots” (Marquez 207). Isn’t the phrase perfectly explains the reasons why living in a foreign country people still try to use their native language for communication?

Myriam Marquez is speaking about Spanish, her native language, but these words may be related to any language in the world. Language is not just the collection of sounds which combination comprises words, it is the storage of the traditions and culture. It is possible to notice that when people communicate with the help of their native language (living for a long time in another country and speaking strange language) they become happier as it is an opportunity to touch their culture even staying in a strange country.

Speaking my native language it seems that I show respect to my native culture. It is really easy to refuse from the native roots if you live in the country which gives you more. Still, I cannot do this. I cannot refuse from my native land as I love it with the whole my heart.

Respect to culture roots is something more that speaking the language of the native country, but living in a foreign state it can be the only possible variant to give credit for the native land, relatives and other ancestry who had lived there before and had made all possible that we, modern generation, could be born and grow up in a free country with remained customs and traditions.

I live in the USA not so long, but, still, the desire to speak my native language is always too high. The inability to see my relatives, communicate face-to-face with my school friends increases the desire to use native language in the everyday life. I always try to use the slightest possibility to speak Russian as it makes me feel closer to the country I have grown up in.

Cultural roots have always been important even for those who had to leave their country because of the inability to find job there or just for searching better life. When I speak my native language, I always remember my parents and relatives, some specific situations connected with them.

Sometimes I feel that the communication with the help of my native language does not allow me to forget my native country, my customs and traditions, my personal and cultural identity. No matter how long I am going to live in this country, how often I am going to communicate in English, I will always remain Russian in my soul. Once I met a woman.

She was about 75-80 years old. Her English was perfect and I thought that she was a born American, but when she heard me speaking over the telephone in Russian (I talked to my parents), she said that Russian was her native language as well. She had been living for 50 years in the USA, but she still tried to speak her native language as it helped her remain Russian in her heart. That chance meeting made me think about my personal life and the place of my native culture in present me.

I would like to say that culture and language are essential parts of every person. No matter where life can bring a person, how far from the native country he/she may appear, language is always the reminder about the culture and traditions one has been growing up in.

Communicating in English, I always felt that it is not my native language, that I am far from my relatives and friends and when the feeling of miss fulfills my heart I ring up my parents and communicate with them in my native language, the one I got used to from the cradle and the one I am going to carry with me for a length of time.

Agosin, Marjorie. “Always Living in Spanish: Recovering the Familiar, through Language.” Multilingual USA : 201-206.

Marquez, Myriam. “Why and when we speak Spanish in public.” Multilingual USA : 207-209.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, April 22). Native Language and Its Role in a Person' Life. https://ivypanda.com/essays/native-language-and-its-role-in-a-person-life/

"Native Language and Its Role in a Person' Life." IvyPanda , 22 Apr. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/native-language-and-its-role-in-a-person-life/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Native Language and Its Role in a Person' Life'. 22 April.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Native Language and Its Role in a Person' Life." April 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/native-language-and-its-role-in-a-person-life/.

1. IvyPanda . "Native Language and Its Role in a Person' Life." April 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/native-language-and-its-role-in-a-person-life/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Native Language and Its Role in a Person' Life." April 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/native-language-and-its-role-in-a-person-life/.

• Distant Pleasures: “Pushkin and the Writing of Exile” by S. Sandler
• Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” Poem Analysis
• Alvin Ailey' and Alexander Pushkin' Views on the Modern Dance
• How Pushkin Illustrates the Theme of Corruption in the "The Queen of Spades?"
• "Ruslan and Ludmila" From Pushkin’s Poetry
• Russian Composers Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev’s Connection With Literature
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Prokofiev: Literature Connection
• Russian Composers Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Prokofiev
• Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham
• Protagonists of the Novel “Eugene Onegin”: The Changes of the Views
• Languages: Translation Impacts on Culture in the Middle East
• Linguistics of the Gurbetcha Dialect
• Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Language
• Literature Studies of the Book “Author” by Donald E. Pease
• "You are What you Speak" by Guy Deutscher

• Our Mission

Incorporating Students’ Native Languages to Enhance Their Learning

Teachers don’t have to speak students’ first languages to make room for these languages in middle and high school classrooms.

I loved my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Phillips. I will always remember how safe and welcomed she made me feel. I would watch her give instructions in English, not understanding a word of it, and I would copy what my classmates did. When Mrs. Phillips came over, I would speak unabashedly to her in Vietnamese. She would pay careful attention to my gestures to decipher my message and praise me with a smile in celebration of my work.

You do not need to speak the same language to feel someone’s love. I also don’t remember her yelling at me to speak English. What would be the use of finger waving and saying, “Speak English!” when Vietnamese was the only language I knew at the time?

As we embrace culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies , we are abandoning destructive English-only policies. Unfortunately, English-first policies often place other languages last—and, by extension, the cultures represented by non-English languages.

What messages are multilingual learners (MLs) internalizing when the only sanctioned language they hear in schools is English? With an additive approach to language , MLs can learn another language without having to subtract their existing ones.

3 Ways Multilingualism Helps Students Learn

1. Mastering content. I used to think that students had to learn content in English. However, a concept like tectonic plates remains the same regardless of the language. Now when I have my students complete a research project, I make sure to tell them that using an article or video in another language is absolutely appropriate.

When my 10th graders were learning about how Covid-19 impacted the Thai economy, many of them used articles written in Thai, as they provided more nuanced and relevant details. In this way, we celebrated the students’ multilingualism and dissolved the language hierarchy myth by showing students that content does not have to be learned in only one language.

2. Collaborating. Learning content by reading articles in students’ languages works for students who are literate in other languages. For students who can only speak and understand their heritage language, learning content is still possible while collaborating with classmates who speak the same languages.

For example, when I had my students read an article in English about land subsidence, I had them pause at the end of each paragraph to talk about and process what they had just read. For many of my students, it was easier to understand the article when they talked about it in their Chinese, Thai, or Korean peer groups. Since learning is a social experience , let’s have students learn using all of their languages.

3. Communicating ideas. Often, MLs have ideas swirling in their minds but struggle to formulate them in English. To support these students, we can have them first brainstorm, organize, and outline in their heritage languages. Forcing students to write or speak only in English is like putting speed bumps in their way. The goal is to have idea generation and to connect concepts at this stage, not English output. Once they have all of their ideas organized using their languages, we can support students to transfer these ideas into English.

With these three approaches to heritage language integration, we see that teachers do not have to know all of the languages their students speak. All teachers need to do is see students’ multilingualism as an asset that extends learning and sustains students’ connections to their communities. As MLs engage more through their languages, our eyes are opened to their potential.

Yes, many of us work in places that require English output on summatives, and state assessments are also in English. However, this does not mean that everything we do as teachers has to be monolingual. Think of languages as tools. If we only have a hammer, there’s a limit to what we can construct. When we are free to use all of the linguistic tools from our toolbox, imagine all of the things that we can create.

Lastly, even if we cannot speak our students’ languages, by welcoming them to use those languages we create a space where assets and cultures are recognized and honored. Years from now, when MLs may have forgotten what we’ve taught, they will still recall with affection how we made them feel. Start with embracing all languages in class.

We're celebrating 50 years of transforming education across the country!

COVID-19 Updates: Visit our Learning Goes On site for news and resources for supporting educators, families, policymakers and advocates.

• Resource Center

Why is it Important to Maintain the Native Language?

• by National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education • IDRA Newsletter • January 2000 • 

Children who speak a language other than English enter U.S. schools with abilities and talents similar to those of native English-speaking children. In addition, these children have the ability to speak another language that, if properly nurtured, will benefit them throughout their lives. In school, children who speak other languages will learn to speak, read and write English. However, unless parents and teachers actively encourage maintenance of the native language, the child is in danger of losing it and with that loss, the benefits of bilingualism. Maintaining the native language matters for the following reasons.

The child’s first language is critical to his or her identity. Maintaining this language helps the child value his or her culture and heritage, which contributes to a positive self-concept.

When the native language is not maintained, important links to family and other community members may be lost. By encouraging native language use, parents can prepare the child to interact with the native language community, both in the United States and overseas.

Intellectual:

Students need uninterrupted intellectual development. When students who are not yet fluent in English switch to using only English, they are functioning at an intellectual level below their age. Interrupting intellectual development in this manner is likely to result in academic failure. However, when parents and children speak the language they know best with one another, they are both working at their actual level of intellectual maturity.

Educational:

Students who learn English and continue to develop their native language have higher academic achievement in later years than do students who learn English at the expense of their first language.

Better employment opportunities in this country and overseas are available for individuals who are fluent in English and another language.

Collier, V. “Acquiring a Second Language for School,” Directions in Language and Education (1995) 1(4).

Cummins, J. Bilingualism and Minority-Language Children (Toronto, Ontario: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1981).

Cummins, J. et.al. Schooling and Language-Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework (Los Angeles, California: California State University, School of Education, 1994).

Wong-Fillmore, L. “When Learning a Second Language Means Losing the First,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly (1991) 6, 323-346.

Reprinted with permission from the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education’s “AskNCBE” web site (www.ncbe.gwu.edu/askncbe/faqs). NCBE is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA) and is operated by the George Washington University, Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Center for the Study of Language and Education.

Comments and questions may be directed to IDRA via e-mail at [email protected] .

[©2000, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the January 2000  IDRA Newsletter by the Intercultural Development Research Association. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]

• Classnotes Podcast

Explore IDRA

• Data Dashboards & Maps
• Educator & Student Support
• Families & Communities
• IDRA Valued Youth Partnership
• IDRA VisonCoders
• IDRA Youth Leadership Now
• Policy, Advocacy & Community Engagement
• Publications & Tools
• SEEN School Resource Hub
• SEEN - Southern Education Equity Network
• Semillitas de Aprendizaje
• YouTube Channel
• Early Childhood Bilingual Curriculum
• IDRA Newsletter
• IDRA Social Media
• Southern Education Equity Network
• School Resource Hub – Lesson Plans

5815 Callaghan Road, Suite 101 San Antonio, TX 78228

Phone: 210-444-1710 Fax: 210-444-1714

© 2024 Intercultural Development Research Association

Search form

• Find Stories
• For Journalists

Image credit: Getty Images

The power of language: How words shape people, culture

Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

Preserving Native Languages in the Classroom

How native educators are creating immersive learning experiences that connect students with their indigenous language, culture, and lifeways..

Laura Zingg

Editorial Project Manager, One Day Studio

Andy Nez taught his Native language, Diné, for two years as a corps member in New Mexico, not far from where he grew up. He says the language represents much more than words—it’s a window into a uniquely Navajo worldview. Words, concepts, and ways of phrasing questions are rooted in relationships between people, land, and all living things.

Līhau Godden is the first in several generations in her family to speak fluent Hawaiian, ever since her mother and grandmother were required to learn English as the dominant language in school. As a 2015 Hawai’i corps member, Līhau returned to the same Hawaiian immersion school that she attended as a student, to help high schoolers gain mastery of their Native language.

These are just two examples of Teach For America alumni who are dedicated to preserving their Native languages for future generations of Indigenous students, in the classroom and beyond.

The most recent American Community Survey data collected from 2009 to 2013 found that there are 150 different Native North American languages collectively spoken by more than 350,000 people across the country. Native languages account for nearly half of the 350 total languages spoken in the United States. Yet, many of these languages are at risk of becoming extinct with only a small number of speakers remaining.

The reasons for this decline are complex and impact nearly every Indigenous language spoken in the U.S. They trace their origins back to when the first European explorers came to North America and the events that unfolded over centuries as Native peoples were displaced from their land by colonists and settlers.

The harmful effects of policies enacted during this time—such as requiring Native students to attend English-only boarding schools and the forced relocation and assimilation at the expense of eradicating Native language and culture—are still playing out today.

While there is still much work to be done, there have been great efforts since the Civil Rights era and over the past decades to restore Native languages and preserve Indigenous culture, specifically in the classroom—a place where Native children often feel invisible. This includes local and national efforts, such as the recent Senate approval to reauthorize the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act , which supports language preservation and restoration programs for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students. 

The vast majority of this work has happened at the grassroots level, led by Native leaders, activists, and educators who are most directly impacted by the loss of their language. Native communities are still working to undo laws enacted long ago, establishing community-based immersion schools, and partnering with education agencies to offer Native language in public schools.

Children who learn their Indigenous language are able to maintain critical ties to their culture, affirm their identity, and preserve important connections with older generations. There is also an additional benefit for students who learn their Indigenous language from a teacher who shares the same background, history, and culture.

Teach For America’s Native Alliance Initiative partners with Native communities across the U.S. to recruit more Native teachers into the classroom, particularly in the communities they are from. TFA alums, Līhau Godden and Andy Nez are part of a community of over 300 Native alumni who are helping Native students feel seen by reinforcing their language, culture, and stories in the classroom.

Nurturing the Next Generation of Navajo Speakers

One of the greatest Navajo teachings that Andy follows is, K'ézhnídisin dóó dadílzinii jidísin . It’s a Diné phrase that means “admire all living beings and respect all that is sacred.”

Andy is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and currently works for the Department of Diné Education in Window Rock, Arizona, as a senior education specialist. He says his grandparents played an important role in transmitting the Diné language to him. From a young age, Andy joined his grandmother and aunt in traditional Navajo seasonal ceremonies and learned Diné within the context of the changing landscape, the way his family had done for generations.

“Being able to grow up in that environment and converse with elders from 6 or 7 years old all the way into my early teenage years, that's how I picked up the Navajo language,” Andy says

Today, there are approximately 170,000 fluent Diné speakers. While Diné is one of the more widely-spoken Indigenous languages, the number of speakers has declined significantly over the last generation. Between 2000 and 2010, U.S. Census data found that the percentage of Navajos who spoke their Native language dropped from 76 to 51 percent, with younger generations among those who were least fluent. 

While Andy doesn’t consider himself a completely fluent Diné speaker, he can read and write in the language and carry on conversations with the elders in his community. As an undergrad, he tutored young Navajo students and says his love of the Diné language and culture led him into teaching. 

“We think about models or strategies or ways that we can pass on the language, which are important. But really, we should just speak the language whenever we can so that kids are familiarizing themselves.”

Senior Education Specialist, Department of Diné Education

New Mexico '14

Andy taught bilingual education in Diné and English for grades K-5 at Chee Dodge Elementary School in Ya-Ta-Hey, New Mexico, as a 2014 corps member. The school was named after Henry Chee Dodge, the first Navajo tribal chairman. While Andy taught primarily Navajo students, he says they had a range of familiarity with the language. Some could speak in full sentences, while others were only familiar with a few specific words.

Andy helped his students build fluency by building conversation into his lessons. Andy recalls one of his favorite projects, in which students wrote a Diné word describing themselves or their mood on a yellow sticky note. They arranged their notes to form a giant ear of corn, representing their interconnectedness to each other and the earth. They then practiced how to ask the question, “How do you feel?”

“We talked about how our identity is important, and how we are all part of a community that looks out for each other,” Andy says.

When students learned about the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. Army create secret intelligence reports during World War II, they got to practice using Diné to translate their own coded messages.

One of the biggest challenges that Andy ran into was a lack of Navajo being spoken at home, particularly among those who are bilingual, where it’s easy to fall back on English. In order to engage his students’ families in speaking the language, Andy created homework assignments that required students to collaborate with their parents, or a community member or talk with an elder in Diné.

“We think about models or strategies or ways that we can pass on the language, which are important,” Andy says. “But really, we should just speak the language whenever we can so that kids are familiarizing themselves.”

Andy says learning the Diné language helps students stay rooted in their identity and understand their place in the world. He believes that the language has the power to heal the hurts he sees in his community and restore one’s connection with the stories and traditions of the Navajo people.

“Diné language is not just words and sounds. It's teaching the child to appreciate life and to respect their surroundings and all living beings,” Andy says. “When you speak Navajo, you have a sense of respect and a sense of self, and you carry that forward.”

Andy is thinking big about the role he wants to play in preserving the Diné language in the future. He’s currently working on a Ph.D. in educational leadership at Grand Canyon University. He is looking forward to creating Navajo-related programs, teaching gender and sexuality courses through a Navajo cultural lens, and publishing articles in Diné. He says he plans to get more involved in politics and plans to run for Navajo Nation Council in 2022.

Andy has done voice-overs and translation work for various projects, such as a recent documentary called Moroni for President, about a young Navajo man who campaigns to be the first openly gay president of the Navajo Nation. In the meantime, he’s started a series of online lessons called Diné Language in 10 Seconds, in which he uploads videos of himself to his Facebook page, teaching common phrases that can be used at home or in the workplace.

“So as long as I'm on earth, there's going to be a Navajo language speaker, “ Andy says. “That's just my passion and I will continue to do that.”

Teaching Culturally Relevant Science in Hawaiian

When the U.S. government annexed Hawai’i as a territory in 1898, the Hawaiian language was banned from being taught in schools. By the 1980s, English had replaced Hawaiian as the primary language spoken on the islands. Nearly all of the native Hawaiian speakers who were under the age of 18 could fit into a single classroom. 

But that all changed in the 1970s, when Hawaiian language activist Larry Kimura led the effort to convince Hawaii’s Department of Education to approve the creation of Hawaiian immersion schools. The campaign was successful, however, the government did not provide any resources or support. The work of creating the schools was left to community members

As a student, Līhau Godden attended one of these immersion schools, Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino, located in Kona. Then, in 2015 she returned to her alma matter to teach as a corps member.

Because Hawaiian language instruction was banned from schools for several generations, Līhau says she didn’t grow up speaking Hawaiian with her family at home. (Her mother is Hawaiian and her father is not). However, Līhau’s mother wanted Līhau and her siblings to grow up knowing how to speak Hawaiian. In addition to sending her children to the Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino immersion school, Līhau’s mother also joined the movement to restore Hawaiian language by helping to establish a Hawaiian immersion day-care center.

After college, Līhau returned to Kona and began volunteering at Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino, helping administer Hawaiian language tests. The school had a shortage of Hawaiian-speaking teachers so Līhau applied through Teach For America, which has a partnership with the school.

“It may seem serendipitous, but it was the perfect fit,” Līhau says.

“Whenever I meet kids who go to immersion schools, I always speak to them in Hawaiian so they can see that there are people out there who use it. It allows us to stay connected to our values and keep stories from our ancestors alive.”

Līhau Godden

Hawai'i '15

Līhau taught 7-12-grade science, entirely in Hawaiian. While Hawaiian immersion schools have come a long way, Līhau says it is still rare to find teachers who are fluent in Hawaiian and also have specific subject matter expertise. 

Līhau’s students came in with a range of fluency in Hawaiian. During her first year of teaching, many students were frustrated with the steep learning curve. They were not only learning new science concepts, but they were learning them entirely in Hawaiian.

“It's a lot of new vocabulary,” Līhau says. “Even for the kids who have been speaking Hawaiian, since they were in kindergarten, if they haven't learned those higher-level science vocabulary words in Hawaiian, they're kind of lost too.”

Līhau worked to ground her lessons in Hawaiian culture, helping her students make connections between science, Hawaiian history, and folklore. When learning about the solar system, Līhau wove in traditional Hawaiian stories about the role that the moon phases play in helping people keep time and mark specific rituals throughout the year. They talked about the Hawaiian star compass and how their ancestors used stars to navigate while traveling by sea. During chemistry class, students explored the chemical compounds found in traditional Hawaiian medicine.

“There is so much science baked into the culture,” Līhau says. “You're still touching on all these different science standards and science concepts, but approaching it from a different perspective.”

Līhau says so much of the Hawaiian language and stories are rooted in the idea that everything shares a connection back to the land. The Hawaiian word for land is Āina. But it can also be broken down into words that refer to being fed or nourished, such as ʻai ʻana which means “to eat.” By learning the language, students are also able to view the world through a Hawaiian perspective. 

“Through the language, you're able to access cultural protocol and stories and songs,” Līhau says. “Hawaiian is so poetic, and there are so many double meanings that you don't ever fully understand from just the translation.”

During the four years that Līhau taught at Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino, she was part of a school-wide effort to focus on speaking Hawaiian throughout the school day. She helped the school implement a class in which students were grouped by speaking level, rather than grade level, and worked with her school team to fill in gaps in the school’s Hawaiian-language science curriculum. She also helped develop culturally relevant science standards for immersion schools that were grounded in Hawaiian culture. 

“My students made a lot of improvement as the result of teachers and students holding each other accountable for speaking more Hawaiian,” she says. “By the third year, hardly any of my students spoke English to me.”

In 2015 Līhau traveled with her students to Washington, D.C., to perform at TFA’s 25th-anniversary summit. She and her students performed a traditional hula in front of 10,000 people. While Līhau says the experience was a bit nerve-wracking, it was an important moment for her students to be seen and to share their stories in their Native language.

Līhau now lives near where she taught and helps support her family’s business. She’s passionate about preserving the Hawaiian language and contemplating what her next steps will be. For now, she says the most important thing is to normalize the language by speaking it as much as possible in her day-to-day life.

“Whenever I meet kids who go to immersion schools, I always speak to them in Hawaiian so they can see that there are people out there who use it,” Līhau says. “It allows us to stay connected to our values and keep stories from our ancestors alive.”

Sign up to receive articles like this in your inbox!

Thanks for signing up!

Content is loading...

• Families & Communities
• Native Community

Native Language

Related Stories

19 Resources and Ideas to Celebrate the MLK Day of Service

Here are some ways you can serve–virtually or in person–on MLK Day.

The TFA Editorial Team

Season 2, Bonus Episode 2: Not Just Another Building

During an educators' meeting in Memphis, KeAsia Norman, a BIPOC educator and aspiring school leader said, “If a school isn’t actively engaged in the community, it’s just another building.” In this special episode, recorded live at SXSW EDU, host Jonathan Santos Silva is joined by a panel of innovative BIPOC educators and Teach For America alumni passionate about radically re-imagining the role of school within communities. Through their unique insights, we learn how to transform school buildings into vital community spaces that better reflect their students’ and staff’s needs.

Hosted by Jonathan Santos Silva

Season 2, Episode 3: A Black Man’s Classroom

Host Jonathan Santos Silva speaks with leaders and educators from Brothers Liberating Our Communities (BLOC) in Kansas City, MO about making teaching a sustainable career for Black men.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• HHS Author Manuscripts

The Effect of Second-Language Experience on Native-Language Processing

Margarita kaushanskaya.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Viorica Marian

Northwestern University

Previous work on bilingual language processing indicates that native-language skills can influence second-language acquisition. The goal of the present work was to examine the influence of second-language experiences on native-language vocabulary and reading skills in two groups of bilingual speakers. English-Spanish and English-Mandarin bilingual adults were tested on vocabulary knowledge and reading fluency in English, their native language. Participants also provided detailed information regarding their history of second-language acquisition, including age of L2 acquisition, degree of L2 exposure, L2 proficiency, and preference of L2 use. Comparisons across the two bilingual groups revealed that both groups performed similarly on native-language vocabulary and reading measures. However, in English-Spanish bilinguals, higher self-reported reading skills in Spanish were associated with higher English reading-fluency scores, while in English-Mandarin bilinguals, higher self-reported reading skills in Mandarin were associated with lower English reading-fluency scores. These findings suggest that second-language experiences influence native-language performance, and can facilitate or reduce it depending on the properties of the second-language writing system.

1. Introduction

Acquisition of a second language is often viewed as a process that differs from native-language acquisition (e.g., Bley-Vroman, 1990 ), and it is frequently assumed that factors influencing one’s ability to acquire a second language (e.g., motivation) do not play a role in native-language development (e.g., Dornyei, 2001 ). However, it is also well-established that knowledge of a second language impacts the ability to manage information in the native language (e.g., Marian & Spivey, 2003 ), and current cognitive and psycholinguistic models of bilingualism explicitly posit that the two languages interact, even during language-specific processing (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000 ; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002 ). Yet, the degree to which acquisition of a second language influences native-language function remains underspecified, and thus, knowledge regarding the interactivity of two languages within a single cognitive system remains incomplete. The broad goal of the present study was to explore the role of factors that have traditionally been linked to second-language acquisition (i.e., age of L2 acquisition; length of immersion in L2; etc.) in native-language functioning. This work was motivated by two parallel lines of research: First, we considered the literature on environmental factors in L2 acquisition. This literature generally indicates that variability in age of L2 acquisition, extent of L2 immersion, and degree of L2 exposure has a significant effect on attained L2 proficiency. Second, we considered the literature on cross-linguistic influences (or transfer). This work suggests that native-language skills play a significant role in second-language acquisition, and that different combinations of L1 and L2 yield distinct transfer patterns. By integrating these two lines of research, the current study tested whether factors that have been linked to successful L2 acquisition influence native-language vocabulary and reading performance in two groups of bilingual speakers: English-Spanish bilinguals and English-Mandarin bilinguals.

2. Environmental Factors in L2 Acquisition

Variability in second-language acquisition has been linked to a number of factors, including Age of L2 acquisition (AoA, e.g., Hyltenstam & Abramsson, 2003 ), modes of L2 acquisition (immersion vs. classroom, e.g., Carroll, 1967 ), length of L2 immersion (e.g., Flege, Frieda, & Nozawa, 1997 ), and extent of daily L2 vs. L1 usage (e.g., Jia et al., 2002 ). For instance, a robust relationship exists between the age at which a learner was exposed to L2 and the ultimate L2 attainment level (e.g., Birdsong, 2005 ; Birdsong & Molis, 2001 ; Johnson & Newport, 1989 ). Although the precise nature of this relationship is still debated (e.g., Bialystok & Miller, 1999 ) and there is evidence for critical-period effects in L2 acquisition (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989 ) as well as evidence against them (e.g., Bialystok & Hakuta, 1999 ), the link between AoA and proficiency in L2 is no longer a matter of controversy (e.g., Birdsong, 2005 ). Certainly, for phonological (e.g., Flege, Yeni-Komishian, & Liu, 1999 ) and morphosyntactic domains (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989 ), earlier exposure to the L2 yields higher L2 proficiency. While other environmental factors in L2 acquisition have received less attention than age-of-acquisition, there is clear evidence that the degree to which a learner is immersed in L2 (e.g., Carroll, 1967 ; Flege et al., 1999 ), the extent of L2 exposure (e.g., Birdsong, 2005 ; Genesee, 1985 ; Kohnert, Bates, & Hernandez, 1999 ; Weber-Fox & Neville, 1999 ), and extent of on-going L2 use (e.g., Flege, MacKay, & Piske, 2002 ; Jia et al., 2002 ) all influence attained L2 proficiency.

Cognitive models of L2 acquisition therefore must be able to accommodate the role of these environmental variables in order to yield coherent mechanistic accounts of second language development. Yet, models of native-language acquisition and processing do not incorporate these factors, since there is little variability in L1 development that can be linked to the timing and extent of L1 immersion. For example, while age-of-acquisition effects in L2 have been examined from the perspective of when the learner became exposed to L2, research on age-of-acquisition effects in L1 focuses on the age at which a learner was exposed to a particular word (e.g., Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000 ; Carroll & White, 1973 ; Ellis & Morrison, 1998 ; Gillhooly & Watson, 1981 ). This poses problems to theoretical models of bilingualism that attempt to reconcile native-language acquisition and second-language acquisition within a single bilingual cognitive system. In the current study, we aimed to explore the relationship between native-language function and second-language acquisition by examining the effects of L2 acquisition variables (including age of L2 acquisition, degree of L2 immersion in various learning environments, and extent of L2 exposure) on native-language functioning. We also explored the relationship between L2 proficiency and native-language functioning. This approach allowed us to begin integrating L2 acquisition and native-language processing into a single cognitive framework. Examining the relationship between factors associated with L2 acquisition and native-language function also allowed us to explore whether different combinations of L1 and L2 yield distinct patterns of cross-linguistic influences. In order to delineate specific hypotheses with regards to how different combinations of L1 and L2 may influence the degree to which L2 acquisition can impact L1 function, we turned to the literature on cross-linguistic transfer.

3. Native-Language Influences on L2 Acquisition and Processing

The role of native-language (L1) knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition is well-established, and development of second-language phonological inventory (e.g., Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Nancin-Bhatt, 1993 ; Harrison & Kroll, 2007 ), lexical skills (e.g., Ordonez et al., 2002 ; Proctor et al., 2006 ), grammatical competence (e.g., MacWhinney, 1997 ; 2002 ), and literacy abilities (e.g., Gottardo & Mueller, 2009 ) has been linked to native-language skills. The literature is especially robust for the transfer of L1 literacy skills to the acquisition of reading in the L2 (e.g., Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993 ; Lindsay, Manis & Bailey, 2003; Nakamoto, Lindsey & Manis, 2008 ), although evidence for transfer of oral language skills from L1 to L2 also exists (e.g., Ordonez et al., 2002 ; Proctor et al., 2006 ).

Acquisition of L2 vocabulary can pose challenges for language learners, both with regards to the sheer number of words that must be acquired, and with regards to the depth of lexical representations that must be developed. Prior studies have shown that L2 learners differ from native speakers in both the size of their lexicon and in the richness of semantic representations associated with the lexical items (e.g., Meara, 1982 ; Verhallen & Schoonen, 1998 ). For example, bilinguals performing word-association tasks in their second language often produce less mature responses than monolingual participants (e.g., Meara, 1982 ) and have less robust semantic representations for words than do monolinguals (e.g., Verhallen & Schoonen, 1998 ). Further, vocabulary skills in bilinguals’ native language have been found to be lagging compared to monolinguals (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008 ; Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002 ; Ivanova & Costa, 2008 ; Portocarrero, Burright, & Donovick, 2007 ). For example, bilinguals have been shown to be slower at naming pictures in their native language ( Ivanova & Costa, 2008 ) and have more tip-of-the-tongue states ( Michael & Gollan, 2004 ) compared to monolingual speakers. However, while it is known that bilingualism impacts L1 vocabulary skills, relatively little work has been conducted on the relationship between L1 and L2 vocabulary skills in bilinguals.

The majority of studies that have examined the transfer of oral language skills in bilinguals have focused on the relationship between oral language skills in the L1 and literacy skills in the L2, and generally showed that strong native-language vocabulary skills were associated with better second-language performance (e.g., Atwill, Blanchard, Gorin & Burstein, 2007 ; Mumtaz & Humphreys, 2002 ; Nagy et al., 1993 ; Proctor, August, Carlo, & Snow, 2006 ). However, the relationship between oral language skills in L1 and oral language skills in L2 has been left relatively unexplored, and the small number of studies that examined the relationship between L1 and L2 vocabulary skills have been inconclusive. In one study of how oral language skills may transfer across bilinguals’ two languages, Ordonez, Carlo, Snow, and McLaughlin (2002) examined the depth of bilinguals’ word knowledge through analyzing children’s performance on word-description and definition tasks. The results suggested that vocabulary skills transferred from children’s L1 (Spanish) to L2 (English), with children’s knowledge of super-ordinate information in English and Spanish correlating highly. However, the breadth of vocabulary knowledge in one language (i.e., the number of words known in a language) was inversely related to breadth of vocabulary knowledge in another language. Other studies, however, did not find significant relationships between L1 and L2 vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Gottardo & Mueller, 2009 ).

Thus, the work on the relationship between L1 and L2 oral language skills is quite sparse, and it remains unknown whether L2 acquisition can influence L1 vocabulary skills. Moreover, it is unknown whether the relationship between L1 vocabulary skills and L2 experiences remains stable independent of the specific combination of languages known to bilinguals. The first goal of the present study was to examine the influence of L2-acquisition-related factors on native-language vocabulary functioning. We were especially interested in whether different combinations of L1 and L2 would yield similar patterns of relationships between L2 acquisition history and L1 vocabulary skills. Examining two distinct groups of bilinguals allowed us to test the degree to which patterns of L1/L2 relationships generalize across different groups of speakers. In formulating this aim, we relied on evidence suggesting that there are differences in cross-linguistic transfer patterns for literacy-related skills depending on the specific combination of languages known to a bilingual.

Reading acquisition is a complex process that relies on orthographic, phonological, and semantic knowledge. Acquisition of literacy in the second language is known to depend on native-language knowledge (e.g., Sparks et al., 2008 ), and previous work indicates that word decoding, phonological awareness and word recognition in L1 are all predictive of reading outcomes in L2 (e.g., Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993 ; Lindsay, Manis & Bailey, 2003; Nakamoto, Lindsey & Manis, 2008 ). The work on transfer of literacy skills has focused extensively on cross-linguistic similarity as the key variable that may mediate the relationship between L1 and L2 reading. In particular, a number of studies has contrasted the relationship between L1 and L2 literacy in bilinguals who speak two languages that share the writing system (e.g., English and Hebrew) and/or the alphabet (e.g., English and Spanish) and languages that do not share the writing system (e.g., English-alphabetic and Mandarin Chinese-logographic).

Reading an alphabetic language may rely on a somewhat different set of skills than reading a logographic language, and reading Chinese appears to be a process that is distinct from reading English, both with regards to how visual word information is processed (e.g., Akamatsu, 2003 ; Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1999 ; 2000 ), and in the degree to which visual word recognition relies on phonological processing (e.g., Perfetti, et al., 2002 ; Perfetti & Liu, 2005 ). For example, while reading Chinese and reading English both involve activation of phonological information, the timing of activation and the size of the activation unit differ (e.g., Perfetti & Liu, 2005 ). Moreover, it appears that bilinguals who read both an alphabetic and a logographic language apply different strategies for reading each language (e.g., Chen & Tsoi, 1990 ; Green et al., 1996 ).

Given the distinct sets of skills associated with reading alphabetic and logographic languages, it is not surprising that different transfer patterns have been observed for bilinguals who speak two alphabetic languages vs. bilinguals who speak an alphabetic and a logographic language. In general, studies on literacy transfer in bilinguals suggest a robust positive relationship between L1 and L2 skills when the two languages overlap in terms of their writing systems. A number of literacy-related skills can transfer across languages that share orthography, including phonological awareness (e.g., Dickinson et al., 2004 ), decoding abilities (e.g., Sparks et al., 2008 ), and word identification (e.g., Abu-Rabia, 2001 ). As a result of such positive transfer, bilingual children who speak two languages that overlap in their writing systems often outperform monolingual children on literacy-related tasks ( Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 2002 ; Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005 ; Da Fontoura & Seigel, 1995 ; Friedenberg, 1984 ).

The transfer patterns for bilinguals whose two languages do not share the writing system are more complex. It appears that phonologically-based processes show positive transfer between bilinguals’ two languages, even when the languages do not share the writing system (e.g., Harrison & Kroll, 2007 ; Luk & Bialystok, 2008 ; Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2005 ). However, a lack of relationships between L1 and L2 reading skills (e.g., Wang et al., 2005 ) and instances of negative transfer (e.g., Bialystok, 1997 ; Holm & Dodd, 1996 ; Liow & Poon, 1998 ) have also been noted in bilinguals who speak languages that differ in their writing systems. For example, Liow and Poon (1998) showed that children who read a logographic script had lower scores on phonological awareness measures compared to children who read alphabetic scripts. Similarly, Holm and Dodd (1996) found that Chinese-speaking students had difficulty with reading English, and attributed this difficulty to the fact that reading Chinese recruits visual processing skills, while reading English recruits phonological processing skills.

Together, the work on the relationship between L1 and L2 vocabulary and reading skills strongly indicates that native-language abilities can influence second-language vocabulary and reading performance. However, these studies are limited in that they only examine the effects of L1 on L2, thus ignoring the possibility that acquisition of a second language may impact the ability to function in the native language, and in that they only examine the relationships between bilinguals’ L1 and L2 performance on highly-constrained tasks (e.g., word association). Therefore, while current cognitive models of bilingualism incorporate the notions of interactivity between bilinguals’ two languages (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000 ; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002 ), and while it is well-known that aspects of L2 acquisition (including age of L2 acquisition; extent of L2 exposure; etc.) have a strong impact on L2 proficiency, it remains unknown whether experiences associated with second-language acquisition have an effect on native-language abilities. In the current study, we rely on theories of bilingualism that construe bilinguals’ two languages as constantly engaging in dynamic interactions (sometimes, competitive and sometimes, mutually-reinforcing; e.g., Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000 ; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002 ) to hypothesize that experiences associated with L2 acquisition would influence L1 functioning.

4. Current Study

While the transfer of native-language abilities to second-language skills in bilinguals has been a focus of many studies, significantly less is known about the inverse relationship between bilinguals’ second language and their native-language skills. Only a few studies have examined the transfer of language skills from bilinguals’ L2 to their L1, and these have been largely limited by their focus on literacy. Relying on cognitive models of bilingualism that incorporate the notions of interactivity between bilinguals’ two languages and on the cross-linguistic transfer literature, the goal of the current study was to examine the effects of knowing two different second languages on bilinguals’ native language performance. Specifically, we tested whether factors that influence second language acquisition also bear a relationship to native-language vocabulary and reading skills in two groups of bilingual speakers: An English-Spanish bilingual group and an English-Mandarin bilingual group. Since English and Spanish share the writing system (both are alphabetic), we expected positive relationships between knowledge of Spanish and performance on the English reading task. Conversely, since English and Mandarin do not share the writing system (English is alphabetic, while Mandarin is logographic), we expected a negative relationship between knowledge of Mandarin and performance on the English reading task. However, we expected similar relationships between L2 experiences and bilinguals’ native-language vocabulary performance in the two groups of bilinguals.

In order to index bilinguals’ L2 acquisition history, we collected extensive questionnaire data from bilinguals regarding the specifics of their second-language acquisition experiences. The L2 experiences that were of most interest were: (1) L2 acquisition age; (2) extent of prior L2 exposure; (3) extent of current L2 exposure; and (4) self-reported L2 proficiency levels for speaking, understanding, and reading. Since it is well known that earlier L2 acquisition age and increased exposure to the second language lead to improvements in L2 processing abilities (e.g., Flege et al., 1999 ), the same variables should also be related to L1 processing abilities, if knowledge of L2 can influence L1 performance. By considering the role of L2 acquisition, the extent of L2 exposure, and L2 proficiency in native-language functioning, the current study provides a new direction in the work on the relationship between L1 and L2, and the ability of the cognitive system to adapt to the presence of a second language.

Participants

Fifty-three participants were recruited for the experiment, including 29 English-Spanish bilinguals and 24 English-Mandarin bilinguals. All participants spoke English as their first language, and acquired either Spanish or Mandarin as a second language early in life, with a mean acquisition age of 7.3 years ( SE = 1.03) for Spanish speakers, and a mean acquisition age of 2.4 years ( SE = 0.79) for Mandarin speakers. Second-language speaking proficiency levels were similar for the two groups, with a mean of 7.3 ( SE = 0.26) for Spanish and 6.5 ( SE = 0.43) for Mandarin on a scale from zero (no knowledge) to ten (native-speaker knowledge). Moreover, both groups had similar levels of L2 exposure on a daily basis, with an average 12.2 % of the time ( SE = 2.62) for English-Spanish bilinguals and an average 11.9 % of the time ( SE = 3.14) for English-Mandarin bilinguals. See Table 1 for participant characteristics in the two bilingual groups.

English-Spanish Bilingual and English-Mandarin Bilingual Participant Characteristics (Means and SE values)

Both groups of bilingual participants filled out the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire ( Marian, Blumenfeld, & Kaushanskaya, 2007 ). Data from this questionnaire were used to determine participants’ self-reported levels of L2 proficiency, L2 exposure, and L2 experience. All participants were also administered standardized tests of receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, and reading fluency in English.

Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q)

The LEAP-Q is a reliable questionnaire that elicits internally consistent self-reported data regarding bilinguals’ language proficiency, age of acquisition, and history of prior and current language exposure across all languages. The questionnaire was validated in a large sample of bilingual speakers against standardized measures of language ability across various domains (phonology, vocabulary, and morphosyntax), and was shown to be highly predictive of bilinguals’ actual linguistic performance in both the L1 and the L2.

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997 )

The PPVT-III measures receptive vocabulary ability by requiring a participant to listen to a stimulus word and to choose the picture that best represents a stimulus word given four options. The difficulty level of the words increases incrementally with less frequent and later-acquired words appearing later in the test.

Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; William, 1997 )

The EVT measures expressive vocabulary ability by requiring a participant to produce a synonym to a target word. For example, an experimenter reads a target word “walk” while showing the picture of a person walking, and the participant produces a synonym to a target word. The correct responses would be “stroll,” “stride,” “pace,” etc.

Reading Fluency

Participants’ reading skills in English were indexed by the Reading Fluency sub-test of the Woodcock Johnson III - Tests of Achievement ( Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001 ). This test measures how quickly and accurately people read English sentences. Participants are presented with 98 sentences and are given three minutes to read as many of them as they can. After reading each sentence, the participant needs to judge the truth value of the sentence by circling a Yes or No response provided on the answer sheet. The difficulty level of sentences gradually increases.

4.1. Analyses

To examine whether there were differences between English-Spanish and English-Mandarin bilinguals on measures of native-language vocabulary and reading knowledge, independent samples t -tests were conducted that compared bilinguals’ performance on the PPVT-III , the EVT , and the Reading Fluency sub-test of the WJ-II . To examine where there were differences between the two bilingual groups in their L2 acquisition history, independent samples t -tests were conducted that compared bilinguals’ responses on the LEAP-Q that indexed age of L2 acquisition, degree of L2 immersion, extent of on-going L2 exposure, and L2 proficiency. Finally, to examine whether L2 acquisition history was related to native-language vocabulary and reading skills, correlations analyses were performed for each bilingual group, where L2 experiences were correlated with bilinguals’ native-language vocabulary skills and reading knowledge.

5.1. Comparing English-Spanish and English-Mandarin Bilinguals

Native-language vocabulary and reading fluency performance.

Independent-samples t -tests showed that there were no significant differences in bilinguals’ performances on standardized measures of native-language vocabulary and reading. This was true for the PPVT-III ( t (50) = 0.26, p = 0.98), the EVT ( t (49) = −0.998, p = 0.32), and Reading Fluency ( t (38) = − 0.40, p = 0.69) (see Table 2 ).

Between-Group Comparison for Native-Language Vocabulary and Reading Fluency Performance of English-Spanish Bilingual and English-Mandarin Bilingual Participants

L2 Acquisition History

Independent-samples t -tests were used to compare the two bilingual groups to each other with regards to proficiency, exposure, and experience with the second language (Spanish vs. Mandarin). There were differences between groups in the timing of L2 acquisition, including the age of L2 acquisition and the age at which both speaking and reading fluency in L2 were attained. While English-Spanish and English-Mandarin bilinguals acquired reading skills in English at comparable ages, English-Spanish bilinguals acquired reading skills in their L2 later ( M = 10.46, SE = 0.8) than English-Mandarin bilinguals ( M = 7.46, SE = 1.1), t (50) = 2.28, p = 0.027. The L2 acquisition age of English-Spanish bilinguals ( M = 7.39, SE = 1.0) was significantly later than that of English-Mandarin ( M = 2.41, SE = 0.8), t (50) = 3.72, p = 0.01. Similarly, English-Spanish bilinguals attained fluency in speaking ( M = 13.32, SE = 1.5) and reading ( M = 13.96, SE = 1.3) in their L2 later than English-Mandarin bilinguals (speaking: M = 7.14, SE = 0.98; reading: M = 10.19, SE = 1.2), t speaking (44) = 3.23, p = 0.02; t reading (39) = 2.04, p = 0.049. In general, English-Spanish bilinguals acquired their L2 (Spanish) later than English-Mandarin bilinguals acquired their L2 (Mandarin).

There were also differences between the two bilingual groups with regards to self-rated L2 reading proficiency. English-Mandarin bilinguals reported lower levels of L2 reading than English-Spanish bilinguals, t (50) = 3.67, p < 0.01, although both groups reported similar levels of L2 speaking and understanding (all p values > 0.1).

5.2. Relating L1 Performance to L2 Acquisition History

Correlation analyses were conducted within each group to examine the relationship between bilinguals’ second language experience and native-language receptive and expressive vocabulary; similarly, correlation analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between bilinguals’ second-language experience and reading fluency in the native language.

Relating L1 Vocabulary Skills and L2 Acquisition Age

For English-Spanish bilinguals, age of L2 acquisition generally correlated positively with L1 vocabulary knowledge, indicating that later ages of L2 acquisition were associated with better L1 vocabulary knowledge. Specifically, L2 acquisition age correlated positively with L1 expressive vocabulary skills ( r = 0.37, p = 0.05); age at which L2 speaking fluency was attained correlated with both receptive vocabulary skills ( r = 0.47, p = 0.02) and expressive vocabulary skills ( r = 0.72, p = 0.000) in the L1; lastly, age at which L2 reading fluency was attained correlated positively with both receptive vocabulary skills ( r = 0.53, p = 0.006) and expressive vocabulary skills ( r = 0.64, p = 0.001) in the L1.

For English-Mandarin bilinguals, age of L2 acquisition correlated negatively with L1 vocabulary knowledge, indicating that earlier ages of L2 acquisition were associated with better L1 vocabulary knowledge. Specifically, English-Mandarin bilinguals’ L1 expressive vocabulary skills negatively correlated with L2 Age of Acquisition ( r = −0.48, p = 0.03), age at which L2 speaking fluency was attained ( r = −0.49, p = 0.03), and age at which L2 reading fluency was attained ( r = −0.57, p = 0.03).

Relating L1 Vocabulary Skills and L2 Experience

Extent of prior exposure to L2 correlated negatively with L1 vocabulary skills in both English-Spanish bilinguals and English-Mandarin bilinguals. Specifically, for English-Spanish bilinguals, the number of years spent with a Spanish-speaking family correlated negatively with both receptive vocabulary skills ( r = −0.37, p = 0.05) and expressive vocabulary skills ( r = −0.60, p = 0.001) in the L1. For English-Mandarin bilinguals, the number of years spent in a Mandarin-speaking country correlated negatively with receptive vocabulary skills in the L1 ( r = −0.39, p = 0.07).

Extent of current L2 exposure correlated negatively with L1 vocabulary skills in both groups of bilingual speakers. For English-Spanish bilinguals, the extent of current L2 exposure in a family context correlated negatively with both receptive ( r = −0.40, p = 0.04) and expressive vocabulary skills ( r = −0.60, p = 0.001) in L1. For English-Mandarin bilinguals, the extent of current L2 exposure through friends correlated negatively with receptive vocabulary skills in the L1 ( r = −0.37, p = 0.08), while the extent of current exposure to reading in their L2 correlated negatively with both receptive vocabulary skills ( r = −0.36, p = 0.092) and expressive vocabulary skills ( r = −0.37, p = 0.09) in the L1.

Self-rated L2 proficiency levels did not correlate with L1 vocabulary skills in English-Spanish bilinguals. However, English-Mandarin bilinguals demonstrated a negative correlation between self-rated L2 reading proficiency and receptive vocabulary skills in the L1 ( r = −0.53, p = 0.01).

Relating L1 Reading Skills and L2 Acquisition Age

For English-Spanish bilinguals, age of L2 acquisition correlated positively with L1 reading fluency. Specifically, L1 reading fluency correlated positively with both the age at which L2 speaking fluency was attained ( r = 0.64, p = 0.003) and the age at which L2 reading fluency was attained ( r = 0.72, p = 0.0001). This suggests that later acquisition of Spanish was associated with higher reading fluency in English for this group of bilinguals. A similar relationship was noted between English-Spanish bilinguals’ age of L2 acquisition and L1 vocabulary performance. However, there were no significant correlations observed between the age of L2 acquisition and reading fluency in L1 for English-Mandarin bilinguals.

Relating L1 Reading Skills and L2 Experience

For English-Spanish bilinguals, the extent of prior L2 exposure did not correlate with L1 reading fluency. However, for English-Mandarin bilinguals, L1 Reading Fluency was negatively correlated with the number of years spent in a Mandarin-speaking country ( r = −0.50, p = 0.04).

For English-Spanish bilinguals, there was no correlation between the extent of current L2 exposure and L1 Reading Fluency. However, for English-Mandarin bilinguals, L1 Reading Fluency correlated negatively with the extent of current exposure in the context of L2-speaking friends ( r = −0.44, p = 0.06), and correlated positively with the extent of current exposure in the context of L2-speaking family ( r = 0.40, p = 0.09).

Generally, L2 proficiency correlated positively with L1 Reading Fluency in English-Spanish bilinguals, but negatively in English-Mandarin bilinguals. Specifically, for English-Spanish bilinguals, L1 Reading Fluency correlated positively with L2 speaking proficiency ( r = 0.38, p = 0.08) and with L2 reading proficiency ( r = 0.42, p = 0.06). However, for English-Mandarin bilinguals, L1 reading fluency correlated negatively with L2 reading proficiency ( r = −0.61, p = 0.007).

6. Discussion

The role of native-language (L1) knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition is well-established (e.g., Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Nancin-Bhatt, 1993 ; Harrison & Krol, 2007 ; Ordonez et al., 2002 ; Proctor et al., 2006 ; MacWhinney, 1997 ; 2002 ) especially with regards to literacy skills (e.g., Gottardo & Mueller, 2009 ; Lindsay, Manis & Bailey, 2003; Nakamoto, Lindsey & Manis, 2008 ). However, less is known about the transferability of oral language skills, e.g., vocabulary knowledge, and about the effects L2 acquisition may have on native-language performance. The current study was designed to address two interrelated questions: First, we examined whether acquisition of a second language can influence native-language vocabulary and reading performance. Second, we examined whether acquisition of two different L2s – Spanish and Mandarin – may have distinct influences on bilinguals’ native language skills (English). Our broad hypothesis was that knowledge of L2 would mediate L1 performance, but that distinct L2 experiences would have different influences on L1 performance. Specifically, we predicted that acquisition of Spanish vs. Mandarin as the second language would have distinct effects on native-language English reading skills in the two groups of bilinguals.

In general, our findings suggest that acquisition of a second language is related to bilinguals’ performance in the native language. The robustness of the correlation analyses attests to the relationships between factors associated with L2-acquisition and L1 skills, both in the vocabulary domain and the reading domain. Crucially, the effects were not limited to a single factor associated with L2 acquisition, and instead, Age of L2 acquisition, immersion- and experience-related measures associated with L2 acquisition and use, and L2 proficiency all entered into significant relationships with L1 performance. This pattern of findings supports the interactive view of the bilingual cognitive system, and suggests that acquisition and processing of L1 and L2 are mutually-dependent processes. While prior work in this general theoretical framework only considered the effects of native-language knowledge on L2 processing, the current study indicates that similar effects are present when the effects of second-language knowledge on L1 processing are considered.

Distinct patterns of findings were observed for the relationship between L2-acquisition-history and L1 vocabulary skills in the two groups of bilinguals. While in English-Spanish bilinguals, later acquisition of L2 was associated with higher L1 vocabulary performance, in English-Mandarin bilinguals, later acquisition of L2 was associated with lower L1 vocabulary performance. The relationship between L2 acquisition age and L1 vocabulary in English-Spanish bilinguals can be easily interpreted, since later exposure to Spanish would have allowed English-Spanish bilinguals more time to be exposed to English, thus yielding higher English vocabulary scores later in life. However, the relationship between L2 acquisition age and L1 vocabulary in English-Mandarin bilinguals cannot be explained using the same logic, since earlier exposure to Mandarin should have reduced exposure to English, thus decreasing English vocabulary performance. One possible explanation for the inverse relationship between L2 acquisition age and L1 vocabulary skills in English-Mandarin bilinguals is that early exposure to two highly distinct languages like English and Mandarin may actually facilitate the ability to acquire vocabulary later in life. Evidence for such a mechanism was obtained by Bialystok (1997) , who showed that while at 4 years of age, children exposed to both Chinese and English performed less successfully on literacy tasks than monolingual children or children, by 5 years of age, this disadvantage resolved, and English-Chinese children actually outperformed the monolingual group. Similarly, Kaushanskaya and Marian (2009) found that early exposure to English and Mandarin yielded enhanced word-learning skills in adult English-Mandarin bilinguals compared to monolingual speakers of English. Clearly, then, further studies are necessary to delineate the possible differences in how exposure to two different L2s early in life can impact on subsequent vocabulary development. However, the correlation patterns obtained in the current study indicate that differences in L2s acquired in childhood can yield distinct influences on native-language vocabulary performance in adulthood.

The differences in how the age of L2 acquisition influenced L1 vocabulary performance in the two groups of bilinguals are in stark contrast to the similarities in how the extent of L2 immersion (past and present) influenced L1 vocabulary performance in English-Spanish and English-Mandarin bilinguals. For both groups, longer immersion in L2 was associated with decreased L1 vocabulary performance. Since increased exposure to L2 throughout the lifespan necessarily reduces exposure to L1, and since acquisition of vocabulary occurs through immersion ( Gollan, Montoya, Cera, & Sandoval, 2008 ), this inverse relationship between L2 exposure and L1 vocabulary skills is inevitable. Interestingly, it does not appear to be modulated by the specifics of the L2 (Spanish vs. Mandarin), indicating that extended exposure to any L2 is likely to take a toll on native-language vocabulary skills. These findings are largely in line with prior literature on cross-linguistic transfer, where the breadth of vocabulary knowledge in bilinguals’ L1 was found to be inversely related to the breadth of vocabulary knowledge in their L2 (e.g., Ordonez, Carlo, Snow, & Mclaughlin, 2002 ). These results also align with literature demonstrating that bilinguals perform less successfully than monolinguals on lexical retrieval tasks, even when these tasks are administered in their native language (e.g., Ivanova & Costa, 2008 ).

While we did not expect the typological distance between two languages to moderate the relationship between bilinguals’ L2 and L1 vocabulary performance, we did expect it to influence bilinguals’ literacy-related skills. The extensive literature on cross-linguistic transfer strongly suggests that (1) literacy-related skills in L1 are more likely to transfer to L2 when the two languages share the writing system (e.g., Abu-Rabia, 2001 ; Dickinson et al., 2004 ; Sparkes et al., 2008), and (2) that bilinguals’ literacy skills are positively impacted by the knowledge of a language that shares the reading principles with the target language (and this appears to be especially true when the native language is more transparent than the second language, e.g., Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005 ; Da Fontoura & Seigel, 1995 ). In the current study, there were clear differences between how L2 acquisition history and L1 reading fluency were related in the two groups of bilingual speakers. In English-Spanish bilinguals, there was no relationship between L2-immersion-related variables and L1 reading fluency, but there was a positive relationship between bilinguals’ ratings of their L2 proficiency and L1 reading fluency. This suggests that English-Spanish bilinguals who were more proficient in Spanish were more likely to be better readers in English. Conversely, there were consistent negative correlations between L2-immersion-related variables and L1 reading fluency in English-Mandarin bilinguals, and most notably, there was a robust inverse relationship between bilinguals’ ratings of Mandarin proficiency and their performance on the English reading fluency task. This indicates that English-Mandarin bilinguals who were more proficient in Mandarin were less fluent readers of English.

The interpretation of correlational data must necessarily be cautious. Although it is difficult to construe the findings as suggesting that native-language performance can influence the patterns of L2 acquisition (especially those associated with L2 acquisition age), it is impossible to attribute directionality to the observed effects. Therefore, it is necessary that this work be followed-up with empirical manipulations of bilingual groups. Specifically, it would be worthwhile to recruit larger samples of bilinguals, and split each group into an early-acquisition vs. a late-acquisition sub-groups. Similarly, future work must attempt to equate bilingual groups with distinct language histories (Spanish vs. Mandarin) on L2 acquisition history, in order to more precisely delineate the effect of different L2s on native-language performance. In the current study, the two groups of bilinguals (English-Spanish vs. English-Mandarin) differed not only with respect to the identity of the second language, but also with respect to the L2 acquisition history. Thus, although the two groups were matched in L2 speaking and understanding proficiency and L1 performance, as a group, English-Mandarin bilinguals acquired their L2 earlier than English-Spanish bilinguals, and reported lower levels of L2 reading than English-Spanish bilinguals. It is possible, therefore, that the differences observed between the two bilingual groups are due not to specifics of the L2 (Spanish vs. Mandarin), but to the age at which L2 was acquired (early vs. late). For instance, it is feasible that there is a cut-off age after which exposure to the L2 can lead to lower word-learning ability (akin to the critical-period hypothesis for syntax; Johnson & Newport, 1989 ), so that for bilinguals exposed to their L2 prior to this cut-off, earlier exposure to the L2 may lead to enhancements of the vocabulary-learning mechanisms, while for bilinguals exposed to their L2 after this cut-off, earlier exposure to the L2 may lead to the weakening of the vocabulary-learning mechanism. This would explain the findings in the current data, where earlier exposure to Spanish yielded lower English vocabulary performance, while earlier exposure to Mandarin yielded higher English vocabulary performance. However, this interpretation appears less likely in light of the fact that despite differences in the average ages of L2 acquisition, the ranges for the L2 acquisition age were quite similar across the two groups, and a number of English-Spanish bilinguals reported acquiring Spanish prior to three years of age. Therefore, to fully examine the effects of acquisition history and identity of L2 on native-language performance, experiments that orthogonally manipulate both variables are necessary.

In conclusion, the current study indicates that knowledge of a second language can influence bilinguals’ performance on native-language vocabulary and reading tasks. Moreover, different L2 experiences (i.e., acquisition of Spanish vs. Mandarin as the L2), yield distinct influences on bilinguals’ vocabulary and reading performance. These differences between English-Spanish and English-Mandarin bilinguals in the relationships between the history of L2 acquisition and native-language skills are all the more notable, since the two groups were in fact matched on their English vocabulary and literacy performance. Therefore, the distinct relationships that were observed between L2 acquisition and L1 function in the two groups of bilinguals indicate that seemingly comparable patterns of performance in bilinguals may obscure differences in the mechanisms that underlie L1 and L2 performance. In general, observing L2 influences on L1 suggests bi-directionality of connections between the native language system acquired at birth, and a second language acquired later in life, and the permeability of native-language abilities to influences associated with acquisition of a new linguistic system.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by NSF grant BCS0617455 to the first author and by NSF grant BCS0418495 and NICHD grant NICHD RO1HD059858 to the third author. The authors are grateful to Ashley Saffold for help with data coding.

Contributor Information

Margarita Kaushanskaya, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jeewon Yoo, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Viorica Marian, Northwestern University.

• Abu-Rabia S. Testing the interdependence hypothesis among native adult-bilingual Russian-English students. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 2001; 30 :435–453. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Abu-Rabia S, Siegel LS. Reading, syntactic, orthographic, and working memory skills of bilingual Arab-English speaking Canadian children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 2002; 31 :661–678. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Akamatsu N. The effects of first language orthographic features on second language reading in text. Language Learning. 2003; 53 (2):207–231. [ Google Scholar ]
• Atwill K, Blanchard J, Gorin JS, Burstein K. Receptive vocabulary and cross-language transfer of phonemic awareness in kindergarten children. The Journal of Educational Research. 2007; 100 :336–345. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bley-Vroman R. The logical problem of foreign language learning. Linguistic Analysis. 1990; 20 :3–49. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bialystok E. Effect of bilingualism and biliteracy on children’s emerging concepts of print. Developmental psychology. 1997; 33 :429–440. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bialystok E, Craik F, Luk G. Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2008; 34 :859–873. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bialystok E, Hakuta K. Confounded age: Linguistic and cognitive factors in Click for Article ge differences for second language acquisition. In: Birdsong D, editor. Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bialystok E, Luk G, Kwan E. Bilingualism, biliteracy, and learning to read: Interactions among languages and writing systems. Scientific Studies of Reading. 2005; 9 :43–61. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bialystok E, Miller B. he problem of age in second language acquisition: Influences from language, task, and structure. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 1999; 2 :127–145. [ Google Scholar ]
• Birdsong D. Interpreting age effects in second language acquisition. In: Kroll J, DeGroot A, editors. Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford U. Press; 2005. pp. 109–127. [ Google Scholar ]
• Birdsong D, Molis M. On the evidence for maturational effects in second language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language. 2001; 44 :235–249. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brysbaert M, Van Wijnendaele I, De Deyne S. Age-of-acquisition effects in semantic processing tasks. Acta Psychologica. 2000; 104 :215–226. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Carroll JB, White MN. Word frequency and age of acquisition as determiners of picture-naming latency. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 1973; 23 :85–95. [ Google Scholar ]
• Carroll J. The foreign language attainments of language majors in the senior year: A survey conducted in U.S. colleges and universities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1967. [ Google Scholar ]
• Chen HC, Tsoi KC. Smbol-word interference in Chinese and English. Acta Psychologica. 1990; 75 :123–138. [ Google Scholar ]
• Costa A, Caramazza A, Sebastian-Galles N. The cognate facilitation effect: Implication for models of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition. 2000; 26 :1283–1296. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Da Fontoura HA, Siegel LS. Reading, syntactic and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-English Canadian children. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 1995; 7 :139–153. [ Google Scholar ]
• Dickinson DK, McCabe A, Clark-Chiarelli N, Wolf A. Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness in low-income Spanish and English bilingual preschool children. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2004; 25 :323–347. [ Google Scholar ]
• Dijkstra T, Van Heuven WJB. The architecture of the bilingual visual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 2002; 5 :175–197. [ Google Scholar ]
• Dörnyei Z. New themes and approaches in second language motivation research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 2001; 21 :43–59. [ Google Scholar ]
• Dunn LM, Dunn LM. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. 3rd ed. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service; 1997. [ Google Scholar ]
• Durgunoglu A, Nagy WE, Hancin-Bhatt BJ. Cross-Language transfer of phonological awareness. Journal of Educational Psychology. 1993; 85 :453–465. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ellis AW, Morrison CM. Real age-of-acquisition effects in lexical retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition. 1998; 24 :515–523. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Flege JE, Frieda A, Nozawa T. Amount of native-language (L1) use affects the pronunciation in an L2. Journal of Phonetics. 1997; 25 :169–186. [ Google Scholar ]
• Flege JE, MacKay IA, Piske T. Assessing bilingual dominance. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2002; 23 :567–598. [ Google Scholar ]
• Flege JE, Yeni-Komishian GH, Liu S. Age constraints on second-language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language. 1999; 41 :78–104. [ Google Scholar ]
• Friedenberg JE. The effects of simultaneous bilingual reading instruction on the development of English reading skills. Acta Paedologica. 1984; 1 (2):117–124. [ Google Scholar ]
• Genesee F. Second language learning through immersion: A review of U.S. programs. Review of Educational Research. 1985; 55 :541–561. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gillhooly KJ, Watson FL. Word age-of-acquisition effects: A review. Current Psychological Reviews. 1981; 1 :269–286. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gollan TH, Montoya RI, Werner GA. Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals. Neuropsychology. 2002; 16 :562–576. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gollan TH, Montoya RI, Cera C, Sandoval TC. More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language. 2008; 58 :787–814. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gottardo A, Mueller J. Are first- and second-language factors related in predicting second-language reading comprehension? A study of Spanish-speaking children acquiring English as a second language from first to second grade. Journal of Educational Psychology. 2009; 101 :220–233. [ Google Scholar ]
• Green D, Rickard Liow SJ, Tng SK, Zielinski S. Are visual search procedures adapted to the nature of the script? British Journal of Psychology. 1996; 87 :311–326. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Harrison G, Kroll L. Relationship between L1 and L2 word-level reading and phonological processing in adults learning English as a second language. Journal of Research in Reading. 2007; 30 :379–393. [ Google Scholar ]
• Holm A, Dodd B. The effect of first written language on the acquisition of English literacy. Cognition. 1996; 59 :119–147. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hyltenstam K, Abrahamsson N. Maturational constraints in second language acquisition. In: Doughty C, Long M, editors. Handbook of second language acquisition. Malden, MA: Blackwell; 2003. pp. 539–588. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ivanova I, Costa A. Does bilingualism hamper lexical access in speech production. Acta Psychologica. 2008; 127 :277–288. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jia G, Aaronson D, Wu Y. Long-term language attainment of bilingual immigrants: Predictive variables and language group differences. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2002; 23 :599–621. [ Google Scholar ]
• Johnson JS, Newport EL. Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology. 1989; 21 :60–99. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kaushanskaya M, Marian V. The bilingual advantage in novel word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 2009; 16 :705–710. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kohnert K, Bates E, Hernandez A. Balancing bilinguals: Lexical-semantic production and cognitive processing in children learning Spanish and English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 1999; 42 :1400–1413. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lindsey KA, Manis FR, Bailey CE. Prediction of first-grade reading in Spanish- speaking English-language learners. Journal of Educational Psychology. 2003; 95 :482–494. [ Google Scholar ]
• Liow SJR, Poon KKL. Phonological awareness in multilingual Chinese children. Applied Psycholinguistics. 1998; 19 :339–362. [ Google Scholar ]
• Luk G, Bialystok E. Common and distinct cognitive bases for reading in English-Cantonese bilinguals. Applied psycholinguistics. 2008; 29 :269–289. [ Google Scholar ]
• MacWhinney B. Second language acquisition and the Competition Model. In: Kroll J, De Groot A, editors. Tutorials in Bilingualism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 1997. [ Google Scholar ]
• MacWhinney B. Extending the Competition Model. In: Heredia R, Altarriba J, editors. Bilingual Sentence Processing. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 2002. [ Google Scholar ]
• Marian V, Blumenfeld HK, Kaushanskaya M. The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 2007; 50 :940–967. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Marian V, Spivey M. Competing activation in bilingual language processing: Within- and between-language competition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 2003; 6 :97–115. [ Google Scholar ]
• Meara P. Word associations in a foreign language. Linguistics Circular. 1982; 11 :29–38. [ Google Scholar ]
• Michael E, Gollan T. Being and becoming bilingual: Individual differences and consequences for language production. In: Kroll J, De Groot AMB, editors. Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; 2004. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mumtaz S, Humphreys GW. The effect of Urdu vocabulary size on the acquisition of single word reading in English. Educational Psychology. 2002; 22 :165–190. [ Google Scholar ]
• Nakamoto J, Lindsey A, Manis R. A cross-linguistic investigation of English language learners’ reading comprehension in English and Spanish. Scientific Studies of Reading. 2008; 12 (4):351–371. [ Google Scholar ]
• Nagy WE, Garcia GE, Durgunoglu AY, Hancin-Hhatt B. Spanish-English bilingual students’ use of cognates in English Reading. Journal of Reading Behavior. 1993; 25 :241–259. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ordonez CL, Carlo M, Snow C, McLaughlin Depth and breadth of vocabulary in two languages: Which vocabulary skills transfer? Journal of Educational Psychology. 2002; 94 :719–728. [ Google Scholar ]
• Perfetti CA, Liu Y, Tan LH. How the mind can meet the brain in reading: A comparative writing systems approach. In: Kao HSR, Leong C-K, Gao D-G, editors. Cognitive Neuroscience Studies of the Chinese Language. Hong Kong University Press; 2002. pp. 36–60. [ Google Scholar ]
• Perfetti CA, Liu Y. Orthography to phonology and meaning: Comparisons across and within writing systems. Reading and Writing. 2005; 18 (3):193–210. [ Google Scholar ]
• Portocarrero JS, Burright RG, Donovick PJ. Vocabulary & verbal fluency of bilingual and monolingual college students. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology. 2007; 22 :415–422. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Proctor CP, August D, Carlo M, Snow C. The intriguing role of Spanish language vocabulary knowledge in predicting English reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology. 2006; 98 (1):159–169. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sparks R, Patton J, Ganschow L, Humbach N, Javorsky J. Early first language reading and spelling skills predict later second-language reading and spelling skills. Journal of Educational Psychology. 2008; 100 (1):162–174. [ Google Scholar ]
• Verhallen M, Schoonen R. Lexical knowledge in L1 and L2 of third and fifth graders. Applied Linguistics. 1998; 19 (4):452–470. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wang M, Perfetti CA, Liu Y. Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition: cross-language and writing system transfer. Cognition. 2005; 97 :67–88. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Weber-Fox C, Neville HJ. Functional neural subsystems are differentially affected by delays in 2 nd language immersion. In: Birdsong D, editor. Second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum; 1999. pp. 23–38. [ Google Scholar ]
• William KT. Expressive Vocabulary Test. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service; 1997. [ Google Scholar ]
• Woodcock RW, McGrew KS, Mather N. Woodcock-Johnson III. Itasca, IL: Riverside Publishing; 2001. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhou X, Marslen-Wilson W. Phonology, orthography, and semantic activation in reading Chinese. Journal of Memory and Language. 1999; 41 :579–606. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhou X, Marslen-Wilson W. The relative time course of semantic and phonological activation in reading Chinese. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2000; 26 :1245–1265. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Native Language Influence During Second Language Acquisition: A Large-Scale Learner Corpus Analysis

Learners' interlanguage is affected by their native language (L1) during second language (L2) acquisition. Current literature focuses on narrow samples, necessitating a large-scale study of the topic. The present study uses a corpus of over 133,000 texts, composed by nearly 38,000 learners of English as foreign language, representing seven different L1s, and all L2 proficiency levels. The effects of the structural relationship between learners' L1 and the target L2 were examined. Overall, there was significant variation, as both structural similarities and differences could either facilitate acquisition, hinder it, or have no significant effect.

Related Papers

Global Social Sciences Review

Shahzeb Shafi , Faraz Ahmed

Language acquisition is a significant and captivating hallmark of human development. This review article briefly describes a few hindrances that the learner of English as being second language learner may deal with. It searches out the essential factors which play a significant part in the second language (L2) learning process. There is a common notion that the learning of L2 is affected by the learner's first language, so we may assert that the mother tongue or first language can interfere with the learning process of L2. The current review showcases the dissimilarities and similarities between L1 and second language acquisition, which is finally concluded with a few implications for language researchers and teachers of English as a Second/ Foreign/ Additional Language.

Melike Ünal Gezer , Burgess- Brigham , Jung-Hsuan Su

Educational policies that impact second language (L2) learners—a rapidlygrowing group—are often enacted without consulting relevant research. This review synthesized research regarding optimal conditions for L2 acquisition, facilitative L2 learner and teacher characteristics, and speed of L2 acquisition, from four bodies of work—foreign language education, child language research, sociocultural studies, and psycholinguistics—often overlooked by educators. Seventy-one peer-reviewed journal articles studying PK-12 L2 learners met inclusion criteria. Findings included: 1) Optimal conditions for L2 learners immersed in a majority-L2 society include strong home literacy practices, opportunities to use the L2 informally, well-implemented specially-designed L2 educational programs, and sufficient time devoted to L2 literacy instruction, whereas L2 learners with little L2 exposure require explicit instruction to master grammar; 2) L2 learners with strong L2 aptitude, motivation, and first language (L1) skills are more successful; 3) Effective L2 teachers demonstrate sufficient L2 proficiency, strong instructional skills, and proficiency in their students' L1; 4) L2 learners require 3-7 years to reach L2 proficiency, with younger learners typically taking longer but more likely to achieve close-to-native results. These findings, even those most relevant to education, are not reflected in current US policy. Additional research is needed on the characteristics of successful or unsuccessful L2 learners and L2 teachers. Such research should attend systematically to the differences between L2 learning in maximal versus minimal input settings; whereas the psycholinguistic challenges of L2 learning might be common across settings, the sociocultural and interactional challenges and opportunities differ in ways that can massively impact outcomes.

nur shahirA

—One of the most important and fascinating aspects of human development is language acquisition. The present review summarizes some difficulties that second language learners may face to learn English. It has tried to find out factors that play an important role in the acquisition of second language. It is a popular belief that first language has an effect on the second language acquisition, and it is claimed that L1 can interfere with the acquisition of L2. It is also believed that the role of L1 in the L2 depends on some similarities and differences between the two languages. The present review brings to the fore the similarities and differences between the first language and second language acquisition. It then concludes with some implications for teachers and researchers.

Matthew Beal

fernanda simanjuntak

Tri Westi Iriandini

This paper delves into the intricate realm of second language acquisition (SLA), focusing on the challenges and significance of mastering a second language, particularly English, within the context of multilingualism. Examining global bilingualism and the specific case of Indonesia, the study explores the distinct processes of acquiring proficiency in a second language. Problem formulations encompass the world of second language acquisition, its nature, comparison between levels B1 and B2, logical issues in language learning, and the framework guiding second language acquisition. The discussion navigates through the varied landscapes of multilingualism globally, emphasizing challenges faced by individuals in acquiring proficiency, especially in English. It dissects the natural process of first language acquisition in children, contrasting it with the complexities adults encounter in learning a second language. A comparative analysis of first and second language learning stages illuminates initial, intermediate, and final states. Logical issues in language learning, such as syntactic phenomena, are scrutinized, emphasizing the role of innate knowledge in shaping linguistic competence. The framework for second language acquisition is explored through linguistic, psychological, and social perspectives, establishing connections between theoretical models and practical applications. In conclusion, the paper underscores the dual nature of language acquisition, acknowledging the ease of first language mastery contrasted with the challenges posed by subsequent language learning. The theoretical frameworks provided offer diverse perspectives, emphasizing linguistic, psychological, and social dimensions in the study of SLA. While acknowledging significant strides, the paper advocates for further research to unravel the mysteries surrounding second language acquisition and enhance language learning methodologies.

Ameziane Wassila

International Forum

Safary Wa-Mbaleka

Second language acquisition (SLA) is known as both the process of learning an additional language and the field where issues pertaining to the teaching and learning of a second language (L2) are discussed (Ellis, 2010; Nunan, 2001). The field of SLA has experienced exponential growth over the past 3 decades. As Ellis (2010) states it rightly, SLA is "now an established discipline" (p. 182). This is evident in the growth of SLA research, SLA textbooks, and increase in number of theories, principles, and strategies that are found in the field of SLA. While this tremendous advance has been heavily demonstrated particularly in the United States, growth seems sparing in other countries. In fact, few are higher education institutions that offer Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programs where SLA courses should normally be offered. Without proper knowledge and understanding of how L2s are taught and learned, it is quite likely that teaching English to non-native speakers in these non-English speaking countries is negatively affected. This paper synthesizes important topics pertaining to SLA to help TESOL experts with some fundamental understanding.

Foundations of Second Language Acquisition

derrick baraza

Larry Selinker

The Postscript of the Field Manual (FM), Chapter 10, compares the authors’ proposals to their actual progress 18 months into the project, when “no new informants were to be started” and when “the datacollection schedule was (made) definitive” (10.1). This is a revealing chapter. (Recall that informants in the main longitudinal group and the control group were to be age 18-30, have no native TL-speaking spouse, have no children of school age being educated in the TL, probably be working class, have day-today contacts in the TL, have been in the host country less than one year, have no regular TL instruction, and have the TL as a second foreign language.) The results are startling: “with seven out of ten SL-TL pairs, the schedule has proved impossible to keep exactly as had been planned” (10.1). ’ What went wrong? In addition to the strict entry requirements mentioned above, unforseen political and social factors eliminated many informants. In France the new government created a new i...

RELATED PAPERS

Eric Moigboi

John Mario García Giraldo

Lars Larsen

Dominic Alaazi

MRS Advances

Karel Lemmens

Journal of Cardiovascular Disease Research

Abdellatif Bouazzaoui

The Journal of Chemical Physics

Aaron Stanton

Samir Bashandy

Revista Gestão & Sustentabilidade Ambiental

Paulo S . Almeida

Mateus Araújo

Giorgi Makharadze

Bożena Krupa

Wireless Personal Communications

Eslam Malkawi

Boletin De Ciencias De La Tierra

LUIS NOE CODALLOS MORALES

PIXO - Revista de Arquitetura, Cidade e Contemporaneidade

Carolina Ritter

Pathology - Research and Practice

Ameer Hamza

titi laily hajiriah

Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

Anna Zielińska-Chmielewska

Massimo Fragola

Plant Physiology

David TWELL

Journal of Crop and Weed

Dr. Bhupesh Nandeshwar

Retratos de Assentamentos

MARIA CATARINA CHITOLINA ZANINI

Sustainability

Maged M S Nasser

Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Disease

veronique penlap

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Utility Menu

Pluralism Project Archive

Native american religious and cultural freedom: an introductory essay (2005).

I. No Word for Religion: The Distinctive Contours of Native American Religions

A. Fundamental Diversity We often refer to Native American religion or spirituality in the singular, but there is a fundamental diversity concerning Native American religious traditions. In the United States, there are more than five hundred recognized different tribes , speaking more than two hundred different indigenous languages, party to nearly four hundred different treaties , and courted by missionaries of each branch of Christianity. With traditional ways of life lived on a variety of landscapes, riverscapes, and seascapes, stereotypical images of buffalo-chasing nomads of the Plains cannot suffice to represent the people of Acoma, still raising corn and still occupying their mesa-top pueblo in what only relatively recently has come to be called New Mexico, for more than a thousand years; or the Tlingit people of what is now Southeast Alaska whose world was transformed by Raven, and whose lives revolve around the sea and the salmon. Perhaps it is ironic that it is their shared history of dispossession, colonization, and Christian missions that is most obviously common among different Native peoples. If “Indian” was a misnomer owing to European explorers’ geographical wishful thinking, so too in a sense is “Native American,”a term that elides the differences among peoples of “North America” into an identity apparently shared by none at the time the continents they shared were named for a European explorer. But the labels deployed by explorers and colonizers became an organizing tool for the resistance of the colonized. As distinctive Native people came to see their stock rise and fall together under “Indian Policy,” they resourcefully added that Native or Indian identity, including many of its symbolic and religious emblems, to their own tribal identities. A number of prophets arose with compelling visions through which the sacred called peoples practicing different religions and speaking different languages into new identities at once religious and civil. Prophetic new religious movements, adoption and adaptation of Christian affiliation, and revitalized commitments to tribal specific ceremonial complexes and belief systems alike marked religious responses to colonialism and Christian missions. And religion was at the heart of negotiating these changes. “More than colonialism pushed,” Joel Martin has memorably written, “the sacred pulled Native people into new religious worlds.”(Martin) Despite centuries of hostile and assimilative policies often designed to dismantle the structures of indigenous communities, language, and belief systems, the late twentieth century marked a period of remarkable revitalization and renewal of Native traditions. Built on centuries of resistance as well as strategic accommodations, Native communities from the 1960s on have vigorously pressed their claims to religious self-determination.

B. "Way of Life, not Religion" In all their diversity, people from different Native nations hasten to point out that their respective languages include no word for “religion”, and maintain an emphatic distinction between ways of life in which economy, politics, medicine, art, agriculture, etc., are ideally integrated into a spiritually-informed whole. As Native communities try to continue their traditions in the context of a modern American society that conceives of these as discrete segments of human thought and activity, it has not been easy for Native communities to accomplish this kind of integration. Nor has it been easy to to persuade others of, for example, the spiritual importance of what could be construed as an economic activity, such as fishing or whaling.

C. Oral Tradition and Indigenous Languages Traversing the diversity of Native North American peoples, too, is the primacy of oral tradition. Although a range of writing systems obtained existed prior to contact with Europeans, and although a variety of writing systems emerged from the crucible of that contact, notably the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah and, later, the phonetic transcription of indigenous languages by linguists, Native communities have maintained living traditions with remarkable care through orality. At first glance, from the point of view of a profoundly literate tradition, this might seem little to brag about, but the structure of orality enables a kind of fluidity of continuity and change that has clearly enabled Native traditions to sustain, and even enlarge, themselves in spite of European American efforts to eradicate their languages, cultures, and traditions. In this colonizing context, because oral traditions can function to ensure that knowledge is shared with those deemed worthy of it, orality has proved to be a particular resource to Native elders and their communities, especially with regard to maintaining proper protocols around sacred knowledge. So a commitment to orality can be said to have underwritten artful survival amid the pressures of colonization. It has also rendered Native traditions particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Although Native communities continue to privilege the kinds of knowledge kept in lineages of oral tradition, courts have only haltingly recognized the evidentiary value of oral traditions. Because the communal knowledge of oral traditions is not well served by the protections of intellectual property in western law, corporations and their shareholders have profited from indigenous knowledge, especially ethnobotanical and pharmacological knowledge with few encumbrances or legal contracts. Orality has also rendered Native traditions vulnerable to erosion. Today, in a trend that linguists point out is global, Native American languages in particular are to an alarming degree endangered languages. In danger of being lost are entire ways of perceiving the world, from which we can learn to live more sustainable, balanced, lives in an ecocidal age.

D. "Religious" Regard for the Land In this latter respect of being not only economically land-based but culturally land-oriented, Native religious traditions also demonstrate a consistency across their fundamental diversity. In God is Red ,Vine Deloria, Jr. famously argued that Native religious traditions are oriented fundamentally in space, and thus difficult to understand in religious terms belonging properly tothe time-oriented traditions of Christianity and Judaism. Such a worldview is ensconced in the idioms, if not structures, of many spoken Native languages, but living well on particular landscapes has not come naturally to Native peoples, as romanticized images of noble savages born to move silently through the woods would suggest. For Native peoples, living in balance with particular landscapes has been the fruit of hard work as well as a product of worldview, a matter of ethical living in worlds where non human life has moral standing and disciplined attention to ritual protocol. Still, even though certain places on landscapes have been sacred in the customary sense of being wholly distinct from the profane and its activity, many places sacred to Native peoples have been sources of material as well as spiritual sustenance. As with sacred places, so too with many sacred practices of living on landscapes. In the reckoning of Native peoples, pursuits like harvesting wild rice, spearing fish or hunting certain animals can be at once religious and economic in ways that have been difficult for Western courts to acknowledge. Places and practices have often had both sacred and instrumental value. Thus, certain cultural freedoms are to be seen in the same manner as religious freedoms. And thus, it has not been easy for Native peoples who have no word for “religion” to find comparable protections for religious freedom, and it is to that troubled history we now turn.

II. History of Native American Religious and Cultural Freedom

A. Overview That sacred Native lifeways have only partly corresponded to the modern Western language of “religion,” the free exercise of which is ostensibly protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution , has not stopped Native communities from seeking protection of their freedom to exercise and benefit from those lifeways. In the days of treaty making, formally closed by Congress in 1871, and in subsequent years of negotiated agreements, Native communities often stipulated protections of certain places and practices, as did Lakota leaders in the Fort Laramie Treaty when they specifically exempted the Paha Sapa, subsequently called the Black Hills from land cessions, or by Ojibwe leaders in the 1837  treaty, when they expressly retained “usufruct” rights to hunt, fish, and gather on lands otherwise ceded to the U.S. in the treaty. But these and other treaty agreements have been honored neither by American citizens nor the United States government. Native communities have struggled to secure their rights and interests within the legal and political system of the United States despite working in an English language and in a legal language that does not easily give voice to Native regard for sacred places, practices, and lifeways. Although certain Native people have appealed to international courts and communities for recourse, much of the material considered in this website concerns Native communities’ efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first century to protect such interests and freedoms within the legal and political universe of the United States.

B. Timeline 1871 End of Treaty Making Congress legislates that no more treaties are to be made with tribes and claims “plenary power” over Indians as wards of U.S. government. 1887-1934 Formal U.S. Indian policy of assimilation dissolves communal property, promotes English only boarding school education, and includes informal and formalized regulation and prohibition of Native American ceremonies. At the same time, concern with “vanishing Indians” and their cultures drives a large scale effort to collect Native material culture for museum preservation and display. 1906 American Antiquities Act Ostensibly protects “national” treasures on public lands from pilfering, but construes Native American artifacts and human remains on federal land as “archeological resources,” federal property useful for science. 1921 Bureau of Indian Affairs Continuing an administrative trajectory begun in the 1880's, the Indian Bureau authorized its field agents to use force and imprisonment to halt religious practices deemed inimical to assimilation. 1923 Bureau of Indian Affairs The federal government tries to promote assimilation by instructing superintendents and Indian agents to supress Native dances, prohibiting some and limiting others to specified times. 1924 Pueblos make appeal for religious freedom protection The Council of All the New Mexico Pueblos appeals to the public for First Amendment protection from Indian policies suppressing ceremonial dances. 1924 Indian Citizenship Act Although uneven policies had recognized certain Indian individuals as citizens, all Native Americans are declared citizens by Congressional legislation. 1928 Meriam Report Declares federal assimilation policy a failure 1934 Indian Reorganization Act Officially reaffirms legality and importance of Native communities’ religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions. 1946 Indian Claims Commission Federal Commission created to put to rest the host of Native treaty land claims against the United States with monetary settlements. 1970 Return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo After a long struggle to win support by President Nixon and Congress, New Mexico’s Taos Pueblo secures the return of a sacred lake, and sets a precedent that threatened many federal lands with similar claims, though regulations are tightened. Taos Pueblo still struggles to safeguard airspace over the lake. 1972 Portions of Mount Adams returned to Yakama Nation Portions of Washington State’s Mount Adams, sacred to the Yakama people, was returned to that tribe by congressional legislation and executive decision. 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act Specifies Native American Church, and other native American religious practices as fitting within religious freedom. Government agencies to take into account adverse impacts on native religious freedom resulting from decisions made, but with no enforcement mechanism, tribes were left with little recourse. 1988 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association Three Calif. Tribes try to block logging road in federal lands near sacred Mt. Shasta Supreme Court sides w/Lyng, against tribes. Court also finds that AIRFA contains no legal teeth for enforcement. 1990 Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith Oregon fires two native chemical dependency counselors for Peyote use. They are denied unemployment compensation. They sue. Supreme Court 6-3 sides w/Oregon in a major shift in approach to religious freedom. Scalia, for majority: Laws made that are neutral to religion, even if they result in a burden on religious exercise, are not unconstitutional. Dissent identifies this more precisely as a violation of specific congressional intent to clarify and protect Native American religious freedoms 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Mandates return of human remains, associated burial items, ceremonial objects, and "cultural patrimony” from museum collections receiving federal money to identifiable source tribes. Requires archeologists to secure approval from tribes before digging. 1990 “Traditional Cultural Properties” Designation created under Historic Preservation Act enables Native communities to seek protection of significant places and landscapes under the National Historic Preservation Act. 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act Concerning Free Exercise Claims, the burden should be upon the government to prove “compelling state interest” in laws 1994 Amendments to A.I.R.F.A Identifies Peyote use as sacramental and protected by U.S., despite state issues (all regs must be made in consultation with reps of traditional Indian religions. 1996 President Clinton's Executive Order (13006/7) on Native American Sacred Sites Clarifies Native American Sacred Sites to be taken seriously by government officials. 1997 City of Bourne v. Flores Supreme Court declares Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional 2000 Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) Protects religious institutions' rights to make full use of their lands and properties "to fulfill their missions." Also designed to protect the rights of inmates to practice religious traditions. RLUIPA has notably been used in a number of hair-length and free-practice cases for Native inmates, a number of which are ongoing (see: Greybuffalo v. Frank).

III. Contemporary Attempts to Seek Protection Against the backdrop, Native concerns of religious and cultural freedoms can be distinguished in at least the following ways.

• Issues of access to, control over, and integrity of sacred lands
• Free exercise of religion in public correctional and educational institutions
• Free Exercise of “religious” and cultural practices prohibited by other realms of law: Controlled Substance Law, Endangered Species Law, Fish and Wildlife Law
• Repatriation of Human Remains held in museums and scientific institutions
• Repatriation of Sacred Objects/Cultural Patrimony in museums and scientific institutions
• Protection of Sacred and Other Cultural Knowledge from exploitation and unilateral appropriation (see Lakota Elder’s declaration).

In their attempts to press claims for religious and cultural self-determination and for the integrity of sacred lands and species, Native communities have identified a number of arenas for seeking protection in the courts, in legislatures, in administrative and regulatory decision-making, and through private market transactions and negotiated agreements. And, although appeals to international law and human rights protocols have had few results, Native communities bring their cases to the court of world opinion as well. It should be noted that Native communities frequently pursue their religious and cultural interests on a number of fronts simultaneously. Because Native traditions do not fit neatly into the category of “religion” as it has come to be demarcated in legal and political languages, their attempts have been various to promote those interests in those languages of power, and sometimes involve difficult strategic decisions that often involve as many costs as benefits. For example, seeking protection of a sacred site through historic preservation regulations does not mean to establish Native American rights over access to and control of sacred places, but it can be appealing in light of the courts’ recently narrowing interpretation of constitutional claims to the free exercise of religion. Even in the relative heyday of constitutional protection of the religious freedom of minority traditions, many Native elders and others were understandably hesitant to relinquish sacred knowledge to the public record in an effort to protect religious and cultural freedoms, much less reduce Native lifeways to the modern Western terms of religion. Vine Deloria, Jr. has argued that given the courts’ decisions in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the Lyng and Smith cases, efforts by Native people to protect religious and cultural interests under the First Amendment did as much harm as good to those interests by fixing them in written documents and subjecting them to public, often hostile, scrutiny.

A. First Amendment Since the 1790s, the First Amendment to the Constitution has held that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The former of the amendment’s two clauses, referred to as the “establishment clause” guards against government sponsorship of particular religious positions. The latter, known as the “free exercise” clause, protects the rights of religious minorites from government interference. But just what these clauses have been understood to mean, and how much they are to be weighed against other rights and protections, such as that of private property, has been the subject of considerable debate in constitutional law over the years. Ironically, apart from matters of church property disposition, it was not until the 1940s that the Supreme Court began to offer its clarification of these constitutional protections. As concerns free exercise jurisprudence, under Chief Justices Warren and Burger in the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court had expanded free exercise protection and its accommodations considerably, though in retrospect too few Native communities were sufficiently organized or capitalized, or perhaps even motivated, given their chastened experience of the narrow possibilities of protection under U.S. law, to press their claims before the courts. Those communities who did pursue such interests experienced first hand the difficulty of trying to squeeze communal Native traditions, construals of sacred land, and practices at once economic and sacred into the conceptual box of religion and an individual’s right to its free exercise. By the time more Native communities pursued their claims under the free exercise clause in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the political and judicial climate around such matters had changed considerably. One can argue it has been no coincidence that the two, arguably three, landmark Supreme Court cases restricting the scope of free exercise protection under the Rehnquist Court were cases involving Native American traditions. This may be because the Court agrees to hear only a fraction of the cases referred to it. In Bowen v. Roy 476 U.S. 693 (1986) , the High Court held against a Native person refusing on religious grounds to a social security number necessary for food stamp eligibility. With even greater consequence for subsequent protections of sacred lands under the constitution, in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association 485 U.S. 439 (1988) , the High Court reversed lower court rulings which had blocked the construction of a timber road through high country sacred to California’s Yurok, Karok and Tolowa communities. In a scathing dissent, Harry Blackmun argued that the majority had fundamentally misunderstood the idioms of Native religions and the centrality of sacred lands. Writing for the majority, though, Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion recognized the sincerity of Native religious claims to sacred lands while devaluing those claims vis a vis other competing goods, especially in this case, the state’s rights to administer “what is, after all, its land.” The decision also codified an interpretation of Congress’s legislative protections in the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act as only advisory in nature. As of course happens in the U.S. judical system, such decisions of the High Court set new precedents that not only shape the decisions of lower courts, but that have a chilling effect on the number of costly suits brought into the system by Native communities. What the Lyng decision began to do with respect to sacred land protection, was finished off with respect to restricting free exercise more broadly in the Rehnquist Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith 484 U.S. 872 (1990) . Despite nearly a century of specific protections of Peyotism, in an unemployment compensation case involving two Oregon substance abuse counselors who had been fired because they had been found to be Peyote ingesting members of the Native American Church , a religious organization founded to secure first amendment protection in the first place, the court found that the state’s right to enforce its controlled substance laws outweighed the free exercise rights of Peyotists. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia’s opinion reframed the entire structure of free exercise jurisprudence, holding as constitutional laws that do not intentionally and expressly deny free exercise rights even if they have the effect of the same. A host of minority religious communities, civil liberties organizations, and liberal Christian groups were alarmed at the precedent set in Smith. A subsequent legislative attempt to override the Supreme Court, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act , passed by Congress and signed into law in 1993 by President Clinton was found unconstitutional in City of Bourne v. Flores (1997) , as the High Court claimed its constitutional primacy as interpreter of the constitution.

i. Sacred Lands In light of the ruling in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association (1988) discussed immediately above, there have been few subsequent attempts to seek comparable protection of sacred lands, whether that be access to, control of, or integrity of sacred places. That said, three cases leading up to the 1988 Supreme Court decision were heard at the level of federal circuit courts of appeal, and are worthy of note for the judicial history of appeals to First Amendment protection for sacred lands. In Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority , 19800 620 F.2d 1159 (6th Cir. 1980) , the court remained unconvinced by claims that a proposed dam's flooding of non-reservation lands sacred to the Cherokee violate the free excersice clause. That same year, in Badoni v. Higginson , 638 F. 2d 172 (10th Cir. 1980) , a different Circuit Court held against Navajo claims about unconstitutional federal management of water levels at a am desecrating Rainbow Arch in Utah. Three years later, in Fools Crow v. Gullet , 760 F. 2d 856 (8th Cir. 1983), cert. Denied, 464 U.S.977 (1983) , the Eighth Circuit found unconvincing Lakota claims to constitutional protections to a vision quest site against measures involving a South Dakota state park on the site.

ii. Free Exercise Because few policies and laws that have the effect of infringing on Native American religious and cultural freedoms are expressly intended to undermine those freedoms, the High Court’s Smith decision discouraged the number of suits brought forward by Native communities under constitutional free exercise protection since 1990, but a number of noteworthy cases predated the 1990 Smith decision, and a number of subsequent free exercise claims have plied the terrain of free exercise in correctional institutions. Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith (1990)

• Prison:Sweatlodge Case Study
• Eagle Feathers: U.S. v. Dion
• Hunting for Ceremonial Purposes: Frank v. Alaska

iii. No Establishment As the history of First Amendment jurisprudence generaly shows (Flowers), free exercise protections bump up against establishment clause jurisprudence that protects the public from government endorsement of particular traditions. Still, it is perhaps ironic that modest protections of religious freedoms of tiny minorities of Native communities have undergone constitutional challenges as violating the establishment clause. At issue is the arguable line between what has been understood in jurisprudence as governmental accommodations enabling the free exercise of minority religions and government endorsement of those traditions. The issue has emerged in a number of challenges to federal administrative policies by the National Park Service and National Forest Service such as the voluntary ban on climbing during the ceremonially significant month of June on what the Lakota and others consider Bear Lodge at Devil’s Tower National Monument . It should be noted that the Mountain States Legal Foundation is funded in part by mining, timbering, and recreational industries with significant money interests in the disposition of federal lands in the west. In light of courts' findings on these Native claims to constitutional protection under the First Amendment, Native communities have taken steps in a number of other strategic directions to secure their religious and cultural freedoms.

B. Treaty Rights In addition to constitutional protections of religious free exercise, 370 distinct treaty agreements signed prior to 1871, and a number of subsequent “agreements” are in play as possible umbrellas of protection of Native American religious and cultural freedoms. In light of the narrowing of free exercise protections in Lyng and Smith , and in light of the Court’s general broadening of treaty right protections in the mid to late twentieth century, treaty rights have been identified as preferable, if not wholly reliable, protections of religious and cultural freedoms. Makah Whaling Mille Lacs Case

C. Intellectual Property Law Native communities have occasionally sought protection of and control over indigenous medicinal, botanical, ceremonial and other kinds of cultural knowledge under legal structures designed to protect intellectual property and trademark. Although some scholars as committed to guarding the public commons of ideas against privatizing corporate interests as they are to working against the exploitation of indigenous knowledge have warned about the consequences of litigation under Western intellectual property standards (Brown), the challenges of such exploitation are many and varied, from concerns about corporate patenting claims to medicinal and agricultural knowledge obtained from Native elders and teachers to protecting sacred species like wild rice from anticipated devastation by genetically modified related plants (see White Earth Land Recovery Project for an example of this protection of wild rice to logos ( Washington Redskins controversy ) and images involving the sacred Zia pueblo sun symbol and Southwest Airlines to challenges to corporate profit-making from derogatory representations of Indians ( Crazy Horse Liquor case ).

D. Other Statutory Law A variety of legislative efforts have had either the express purpose or general effect of providing protections of Native American religious and cultural freedoms. Some, like the Taos Pueblo Blue Lake legislation, initiated protection of sacred lands and practices of particular communities through very specific legislative recourse. Others, like the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act , enacted broad protections of Native American religious and cultural freedom [link to Troost case]. Culminating many years of activism, if not without controversy even in Native communities, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act , signed into law in 1978 and amended in 1993, in order to recognize the often difficult fit between Native traditions and constitutional protections of the freedom of “religion” and ostensibly to safeguard such interests from state interference. Though much heralded for its symbolic value, the act was determined by the courts (most notably in the Lyng decision upon review of the congressional record to be only advisory in nature, lacking a specific “cause for action” that would give it legal teeth. To answer the Supreme Court's narrowing of the scope of free exercise protections in Lyng and in the 1990 Smith decision, Congress passed in 2000 the  Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)  restoring to governments the substantial burden of showing a "compelling interest" in land use decisions or administrative policies that exacted a burden on the free exercise of religion and requiring them to show that they had exhausted other possibilities that would be less burdensome on the free exercise of religion. Two other notable legislative initiatives that have created statutory protections for a range of Native community religious and cultural interests are the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Language Act legislation beginning to recognize the significance and urgency of the protection and promotion of indigenous languages, if not supporting such initiatives with significant appropriations. AIRFA 1978 NAGPRA 1990 [see item h. below] Native American Language Act Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)  2000 National Historic Preservation Act  [see item g below]

E. Administrative and Regulatory Policy and Law As implied in a number of instances above, many governmental decisions affecting Native American religious and cultural freedom occur at the level of regulation and the administrative policy of local, state, and federal governments, and as a consequence are less visible to those not locally or immediately affected.

F. Federal Recognition The United States officially recognizes over 500 distinct Native communities, but there remain numerous Native communities who know clearly who they are but who remain formally unrecognized by the United States, even when they receive recognition by states or localities. In the 1930s, when Congress created the structure of tribal governments under the Indian Reorganization Act, many Native communities, including treaty signatories, chose not to enroll themselves in the recognition process, often because their experience with the United States was characterized more by unwanted intervention than by clear benefits. But the capacity and charge of officially recognized tribal governments grew with the Great Society programs in the 1960s and in particular with an official U.S. policy of Indian self-determination enacted through such laws as the 1975 Indian Self Determination and Education Act , which enabled tribal governments to act as contractors for government educational and social service programs. Decades later, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act formally recognized the authority of recognized tribal governments to engage in casino gaming in cooperation with the states. Currently, Native communities that remain unrecognized are not authorized to benefit from such programs and policies, and as a consequence numerous Native communities have stepped forward to apply for federal recognition in a lengthy, laborious, and highly-charged political process overseen by the  Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Federal Acknowledgment . Some communities, like Michigan’s Little Traverse Band of Odawa have pursued recognition directly through congressional legislation. As it relates to concerns of Native American religious and cultural freedom, more is at stake than the possibility to negotiate with states for the opening of casinos. Federal recognition gives Native communities a kind of legal standing to pursue other interests with more legal and political resources at their disposal. Communities lacking this standing, for example, are not formally included in the considerations of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (item H. below).

G. Historic Preservation Because protections under the National Historic Preservation Act have begun to serve as a remedy for protection of lands of religious and cultural significance to Native communities, in light of first amendment jurisprudence since Lyng , it bears further mention here. Native communities seeking protections through Historic Preservation determinations are not expressly protecting Native religious freedom, nor recognizing exclusive access to, or control of sacred places, since the legislation rests on the importance to the American public at large of sites of historic and cultural value, but in light of free exercise jurisprudence since Lyng , historic preservation has offered relatively generous, if not exclusive, protection. The National Historic Preservation Act as such offered protection on the National Register of Historic Places, for the scholarly, especially archeological, value of certain Native sites, but in 1990, a new designation of “traditional cultural properties” enabled Native communities and others to seek historic preservation protections for properties associated “wit cultural practices or beliefs of a living community that (a) are rooted in that community’s history, and (b) are important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of the community.” The designation could include most communities, but were implicitly geared to enable communities outside the American mainstream, perhaps especially Native American communities, to seek protection of culturally important and sacred sites without expressly making overt appeals to religious freedom. (King 6) This enabled those seeking recognition on the National Register to skirt a previous regulatory “religious exclusion” that discouraged inclusion of “properties owned by religious institutions or used for religious purposes” by expressly recognizing that Native communities don’t distinguish rigidly between “religion and the rest of culture” (King 260). As a consequence, this venue of cultural resource management has served Native interests in sacred lands better than others, but it remains subject to review and change. Further it does not guarantee protection; it only creates a designation within the arduous process of making application to the National Register of Historic Places. Pilot Knob Nine Mile Canyon

H. Repatriation/Protection of Human Remains, Burial Items, and Sacred Objects Culminating centuries of struggle to protect the integrity of the dead and material items of religious and cultural significance, Native communities witnessed the creation of an important process for protection under the 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act . The act required museums and other institutions in the United States receiving federal monies to share with relevant Native tribes inventories of their collections of Native human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of “cultural patrimony” (that is objects that were acquired from individuals, but which had belonged not to individuals, but entire communities), and to return them on request to lineal descendants or federally recognized tribes (or Native Hawaiian organizations) in those cases where museums can determine cultural affiliation, or as often happens, in the absence of sufficiently detailed museum data, to a tribe that can prove its cultural affiliation. The law also specifies that affiliated tribes own these items if they are discovered in the future on federal or tribal lands. Finally, the law also prohibits almost every sort of trafficking in Native American human remains, burial objects, sacred objects, and items of cultural patrimony. Thus established, the process has given rise to a number of ambiguities. For example, the law’s definition of terms gives rise to some difficulties. For example, “sacred objects” pertain to objects “needed for traditional Native American religions by their present day adherents.” Even if they are needed for the renewal of old ceremonies, there must be present day adherents. (Trope and Echo Hawk, 143). What constitutes “Cultural affiliation” has also given rise to ambiguity and conflict, especially given conflicting worldviews. As has been seen in the case of Kennewick Man the “relationship of shared group identity” determined scientifically by an archeologist may or may not correspond to a Native community’s understanding of its relation to the dead on its land. Even what constitutes a “real” can be at issue, as was seen in the case of Zuni Pueblo’s concern for the return of “replicas” of sacred Ahayu:da figures made by boy scouts. To the Zuni, these contained sacred information that was itself proprietary (Ferguson, Anyon, and Lad, 253). Disputes have arisen, even between different Native communities claiming cultural affiliation, and they are adjudicated through a NAGPRA Review Committee , convened of three representatives from Native communities, three from museum and scientific organizations, and one person appointed from a list jointly submitted by the other six.

I. International Law and Human Rights Agreements At least since 1923, when Haudenosaunee Iroqois leader Deskaneh made an appeal to the League of Nations in Geneva, Native communities and organizations have registered claims and concerns about religious and cultural freedoms with the international community and institutions representing it in a variety of ways. Making reference to their status as sovereign nations whose treaties with the U.S. have not been honored, frustrated with previous efforts to seek remedies under U.S. law, concerned with the capacity for constitutional protection of what are typically “group” and not individual rights, and sometimes spurned by questions about the rightful jurisdiction of the U.S., Native organizations have sought consideration of their claims before the United Nations and engaged in its consultations on indigenous rights. After years of such appeals and efforts, a nearly unanimous  United Nations General Assembly passed the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples The 1996  Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples includes reference [article 12] to the “right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of ceremonial objects,; and the right to the repatriation of human remains.” Importantly, the Declaration does not exclude those communities whose traditions have been interrupted by colonization. Indigenous peoples are recognized as having “the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures as well as the right to the restitution of cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.” Also specified are their rights to their languages. An offshoot of the American Indian Movement, the International Indian Treaty Council is one such organization that has shifted its attention to the international arena for protections of indigenous rights, including those of religious and cultural freedom.]]

J. Negotiated Agreements and Private Transactions Many if not most Native claims and concerns related to religious and cultural freedoms have been and will continue to be raised and negotiated outside the formal legal and regulatory structures outlined above, and thus will seldom register in public view. In light of the career of Native religious and cultural freedoms in legislative and legal arenas, Vine Deloria, Jr., has suggested the possibilities of such agreements to reach Native goals without subjecting Native communities to the difficulties of governmental interference or public scrutiny of discreet traditions (Deloria 1992a). Still, the possibilities for Native communities to reach acceptable negotiated agreements often owe to the legal and political structures to which they have recourse if negotiations fail. The possibilities of such negotiated agreements also can be shaped by the pressures of public opinion on corporate or governmental interests. Kituwah Mound Valley of the Shields/Weatherman’s Draw

IV. Selected Past Native American Religious and Cultural Freedom Court Cases

A. Land Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority 620 F. 2d 1159 (6th Cir. 1980) . Dam’s Destruction of Sacred River/Land Badoni v. Higginson 638 F 2d 172 (10th Cir. 1980) . Desecration of Rainbow Arch, Navajo Sacred Spot in Utah Fools Crow v. Gullet 706 F. 2d. 856 (8th Cir. 1983), cert. Denied, 464 U.S. 977 (1983) . State Park on top of Vision Quest site in S. Dakota Wilson v. Block 708F. 2d 735 (D.C. Cir. 1983) ; Hopi Indian Tribe v. Block; Navajo Medicine Men Assn’ v. Block Expansion of Ski Area in San Francisco Peaks, sacred to Navaho and Hopi Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association 485 U.S. 439 (1988) Logging Road in lands sacred to Yurok, Karok, and Tolowa

B. Free Exercise Bowen v. Roy 476 U.S. 693 (1986) Native refusal of Social Security Number U.S. v. Dion 476 U.S. 734 Sacramental Eagle Hunt contra Endangered Species Act Frank v. State 604 P. 2d 1068 (Alaska 1979) Taking moose out of season for potlatch *Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council 272 F 2d 131 (10th Cir. 1959) Peyotists vs. Tribal Gov’t Prohibiting Peyotism People v. Woody 61 Cal.2d 716, 394 P.2d 813, 40 Cal. Rptr. 69 (1964) Groundbreaking recognition of Free Exercise exemption from State Ban. Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith 484 U.S. 872 (1990) Denial of Peyotist’s unemployment compensation held constitutional

C. Prison cases involving hair *Standing Deer v. Carlson 831 F. 2d 1525 (9th Cir. 1987). *Teterud v. Gilman 385 F. Supp. 153 (S. D. Iowa 1974) & New Rider v. Board of Education 480 F. 2d 693 (10th Cir. 1973) , cert. denied 414 U.S. 1097, reh. Denied 415 U.S. 939 *Indian Inmates of Nebraska Penitentiary v. Grammar 649 F. Supp. 1374 (D. Neb. 1986)

D. Human Remains/Repatriation *Wana the Bear v. Community Construction, Inc. 180 Cal Rptr. 423 (Ct. App. 1982). Historic Indian cemetery not a “cemetery.” *State v. Glass 273 N.E. 2d 893 (Ohio Ct. App. 1971). Ancient human remains not “human” for purposes of Ohio grave robbing statute

E. Treaty Rights Pertaining to Traditional/Sacred Practices *U.S. v. Washington 384 F. Supp. 312 (W.D. Wash. 1974) aff’d 520 F.2d 676 (9th Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 1086 (1976). Boldt Decision on Salmon Fishing *Lac Court Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Voight, 700 F. 2d 341 (7th Cir.) Cert. denied, 464 U.S. 805 (1983) 653 F. Supp. 1420; Fishing/Ricing/Gathering on Ceded Lands Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians 124 F 3d 904 affirmed. (1999) Fishing/Ricing/Gathering on Ceded Lands

V. References & Resources

Brown, Michael, Who Owns Native Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). Burton, Lloyd Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion, and Law in the Management of Public Lands and Resources (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

Deloria, Vine, Jr., “Secularism, Civil Religion, and the Religious Freedom of American Indians,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16:9-20 (1992).

[a] Deloria, Vine, Jr., “Trouble in High Places: Erosion of American Indian Rights to Religious Freedom in the United States,”in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance , ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

[b] Echo Hawk, Walter,  In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided ( Fulcrum Publications , 2010) . Fine-Dare, Kathleen, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Ferguson, T.J., Roger Anyon, and Edmund J. Ladd, “Repatriation at the Pueblo of Zuni: Diverse Solutions to Complex Problems,” in Repatriation Reader , ed. Devon Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) pp. 239-265.

Gordon-McCutchan, R.C., The Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Red Crane Books, 1991).

Gulliford, Andrew, Sacred Objets and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000).

Johnson, Greg, Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

King, Thomas F., Places that Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management (Walnut Creek, Calif: Altamira Press, 2003).

Long, Carolyn, Religious Freedom and Indian Rights: The Case of Oregon v. Smith (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001).

Maroukis, Thomas A., Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010)

Martin, Joel, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

McLeod, Christopher (Producer/Director), In Light of Reverence , Sacred Lands Film Project, (Earth Image Films, La Honda Calif. 2000).

McNally, Michael D., "Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment," in After Pluralism ed. Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Mihesuah, Devon A., ed., Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

Nabokov, Peter, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Sullivan, Robert, A Whale Hunt (New York: Scribner, 2000).

Trope, Jack F., and Walter Echo-Hawk, “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Background and Legislative History,” in Repatriation Reader , ed. Devon Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 123-168.

Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion : The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Get New Issue Alerts
• American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences

Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives

Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society’s consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation.

Wesley Y. Leonard is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His research aims to build language reclamation capacity in Native American and other Indigenous communities by directly developing reclamation tools and changing the norms of language sciences toward this end. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Indian Culture and Research Journal , Gender and Language , and Language Documentation & Conservation.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ) declared 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages ( IDIL ), noting that “[o]ptimistic estimates suggest that at least 50 percent of today’s spoken languages will be extinct or seriously endangered by 2100. More pessimistic, but also realistic estimates claim that 90–95 percent will become extinct or seriously endangered . . . . Most of these languages are Indigenous languages.” 1 In this summary, UNESCO correctly identifies a major crisis: the world’s language diversity has drastically diminished in the last several decades, many languages are not being transmitted to new generations, and the majority of these languages are Indigenous. 2 This phenomenon, referred to technically in language sciences as community language shift or just language shift but more commonly framed with metaphors for the endangerment of biological species, is particularly serious in North America, the focus of this essay.

Native American and other Indigenous language shift has increasingly become a focus of scientific and social concern, and the collective response has had many effects, several of which are positive. These include increased awareness, research, community language programs, and new networks of scholar-practitioners and activists. Language policy has shifted accordingly, both at the level of individual Indigenous communities and by non-Indigenous governments and organizations, with many calls to support language maintenance and revitalization. The IDIL , for example, “aims at ensuring [I]ndigenous peoples’ right to preserve, revitalize and promote their languages, and mainstreaming linguistic diversity and multilingualism aspects into the sustainable development efforts.” 3 Organizations geared toward this work, along with several language documentation initiatives, have been created. Even the U.S. government, long an agent of violence toward Native American nations and languages, passed in 1990 the Native American Languages Act, which established as policy that the United States will “preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages.” 4 Most important, many Native American communities are working hard for language maintenance and recovery.

I come from a Native American nation that is engaged in such work. I am a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and our language, myaamiaataweenki, fell into almost complete dormancy during the 1960s, having been replaced by English until community efforts began in the 1990s to bring our language back by learning it from historical documentation. I am proud to report that myaamiaataweenki is used by many Miami people today. In this essay, I draw from my experiences in Miami language work, as well as my training and research as a linguist who specializes in language reclamation , a decolonial approach to language revitalization that centers community needs and goals and focuses on addressing the underlying causes of language shift. 5 The way language reclamation brought my community together corroborates, alongside similar examples from other communities, the assertion in the aforementioned Native American Languages Act that “the traditional languages of Native Americans are an integral part of their cultures and identities and form the basic medium for the transmission, and thus survival, of Native American cultures, literatures, histories, religions, political institutions, and values.”

What happened among Miami people — a story of extreme language shift but also, and crucially, of language recovery — is shared by other Native American communities. Indeed, as summarized by Indigenous education scholars Onowa McIvor (maskiko-nehinaw) and Teresa L. McCarty, “the sociolinguistic landscape in Native North America is defined by the dual realities of language loss and reclamation.” 6 However, accounts of reclamation are not widely reflected in academic and popular descriptions of language shift, which instead emphasize only the loss. I collectively refer to these as dominant endangered languages narratives , the core parts of which I refer to in the singular as the narrative . As I detail below by drawing upon tools and principles from Linguistics and Native American Studies, 7 the narrative contains several truths and is framed as beneficent, but draws atten tion away from the injustices that underlie language endangerment.

Linguistics, the discipline described as “the scientific study of language” though better characterized as a set of particular approaches to studying language, is predicated on the inherent value of language. Linguists recognize that all humans use language, and that languages meet the communicative needs of their users and evolve as needed. For this reason, claims about intrinsic deficiencies in a given language variety — for example, that it “doesn’t have grammar” or “is primitive” — are linguistically baseless. Instead, they are manifestations of a sociopolitical principle exemplified throughout this volume: that beliefs about people get transferred to the language(s) with which those people are associated. Beliefs about a given language variety’s alleged superiority or inferiority relative to others, along with other language myths, strongly affect language practices and policies. In contexts where Indigenous peoples are rendered as “savage” or even less than human, related ideologies about Indigenous languages follow.

Related to the point above is the notion that accounts of languages and language use are contextually embedded in historical and contemporary social relations and power structures. As a corollary, public narratives about oppressed language communities are likely to 1) privilege the needs, wants, and perspectives of dominant groups and 2) discount the roles of dominant groups and institutions in this oppression. Following this logic, dominant narratives warrant careful scrutiny, both in terms of their content and who is relating them for whom. Even “descriptions” can become speech acts — statements that perform an action — especially when they come from people with power. As discussed throughout this essay, it is common for non-Indigenous agents who have considerable power due to their social positions to describe Native American languages in ways that are not accountable to Native American communities.

Conversely, the field of Native American Studies frames issues, linguistic and otherwise, through Native American experiences and points of view, and strongly emphasizes accountability to Native American nations. Though a principle of Native American Studies is that respect for tribal sovereignty entails identifying differences among tribal nations, the field also recognizes common experiences across multiple nations, especially those with shared relationships to a particular colonial government. For this reason, alongside attention to particular tribal histories and circumstances, it is common for structures of oppression, and strategies to end them, to be theorized in general ways as I do in this essay. Native American Studies responds to a variety of oppressions such as racism and sexism, recognizing the need for an intersectional analytic as elaborated by Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser in this volume, but stresses the major role of colonization in contemporary Native American experiences. 8 To this end, Tribal Critical Race Theory, a framework that draws upon general principles of Critical Race Theory but adds and highlights the political status (nationhood) and experiences of Native Americans, asserts as a foundational principle that colonization is endemic in wider society. 9 Particularly important for this essay is settler colonialism , the project and supporting logics whereby governments such as those of the United States and Canada try to replace Indigenous peoples — and by extension our languages, lifeways, intellectual traditions, and futures — through resettling Indigenous lands with new polities and linguistic landscapes.

Given the violence of settler colonialism, scholarship in Native American Studies frequently references oppression and trauma. As these accounts are crucial for understanding realities such as the current status of Native American languages, I include them. At the same time, I share Unanga x̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s observation that “damage-centered” accounts can promote problematic views of contemporary Indigenous peoples and mask our resilience and successes. 10 My response is to refuse the assumptions of inferiority that often accompany such accounts and instead to promote reclamation, with emphasis on how Indigenous cultural and intellectual traditions provide tools to support this work. For example, the focus on relationships that is core to Miami and other Native American communities’ ways of knowing is hugely important for language reclamation. A relational approach to understanding the world illuminates how language shift occurs when something ruptures the relationships people have to languages; language recovery thus requires rebuilding these relationships.

Though linguists certainly consider relationships such as how multiple languages may derive from a common source, it is not a disciplinary norm of Linguistics to follow the relational model described above. Instead, aligning with dominant academic practices of conceptualizing knowledge as universal and disembodied, it is common for linguists to focus on discrete elements, such as sounds, words, and clauses. Moreover, it is common practice for researchers to present linguistic analyses without mentioning their relationships to the communities whose languages are under discussion or engaging the question of who is licensed to make or share a given analysis. According to this logic, the quality of research conclusions lies in their reasoning, evidence, and impact. In Native American Studies, conversely, these metrics apply, but there is also emphasis on how knowledge is produced in particular places and contexts, with significant attention paid not only to what knowledge should be produced but also if, how, and by whom it should be shared.

As a Miami person whose lived experiences with language shift and recovery primarily involve my own and other North American Indigenous communities, and whose professional training occurred at U.S. institutions, my analysis draws on global trends but focuses on North American (particularly U.S.) dynamics. For this reason, the points I offer in this essay should not be taken as universal, though I draw attention to two themes that I believe are true for most Indigenous communities. First, members of Indigenous communities (as with minoritized communities in general) share the experience of being the characters, rather than the narrators, of stories and theories about language shift. Second, although many language scholars and activists center social justice when responding to language endangerment, this is not true for dominant endangered languages narratives. While the sharing of these narratives has supported some important interventions in research, education, and policy, their framing can harm Indigenous communities and the language reclamation work we do.

Widely referenced by linguists as a call to action is the 1992 “Endangered Languages” collection of papers published in Language , a flagship journal in Linguistics. This series includes linguist Michael Krauss’s essay “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” which claims that “[l]anguages no longer being learned as mother-tongue by children are beyond mere endangerment, for, unless the course is somehow dramatically reversed, they are already doomed to extinction, like species lacking reproductive capacity.” 11

While such a break in intergenerational transmission actually applies to an array of languages and dialects, several of which are not Indigenous, Indigenous languages have become the prototype in discussions of language shift. This theme of doom and gloom, with Indigenous language “extinction” as the presumed endpoint, anchors many popular as well as scientific discussions of language endangerment, and is central to dominant endangered languages narratives.

For instance, the teleological trajectory toward complete nonuse of a given language, described in the narrative as “extinction,” is almost always anchored in predictions with specific numbers. In general, this is operationalized through a statement that some percentage of the world’s roughly seven thousand languages will disappear within a specified time frame, often one hundred years, as with the IDIL statement quoted earlier. Sometimes the narrative mentions that “languages have always died,” but with an accompanying explanation that this phenomenon has greatly accelerated in recent times. Especially frequent in reference to current trends is the specific claim that “a language dies every two weeks.” Though empirical research reported on in the Catalogue of Endangered Languages finds instead that this rate is actually about every twelve weeks, the crux of the idea holds. 12

Even though the narrative often ignores major types of linguistic diversity — for example, the glaring omission of endangered sign languages — it normally includes a statement about the value of linguistic diversity, or of human diversity more broadly. If framed within human rights, the narrative could offer compelling support for social justice. However, the narrative instead too easily evokes neoliberal discourses of diversity, in which examples that are lesser known by dominant groups — the assumed baseline — are rendered “diverse” and become repurposed as resources. This is exemplified by the narrative’s lamentation of cultural and scientific losses when languages “disappear,” emphasizing how “we” (who is the pronoun referring to?) are losing this knowledge or “our” heritage.

Particularly when shared with academic audiences, these claims of imminent loss frequently reference how language diversity is crucial to science. For instance, a major research framework in Linguistics aims to uncover universals of human languages, a task that requires data from many languages, including, of course, those that are endangered. Especially when related by linguists, the narrative may include details about how concepts are encoded in grammar, or how ecological knowledge may be gleaned from words. Longer versions might include examples of concepts known only because “we discovered them before it was too late.”

Although the basic idea is true — that different groups, and by extension different languages, encode different types of information and showcase human linguistic potential in different ways — the problems in this section of the narrative are numerous. As elaborated throughout this essay, the framing of Indigenous languages as resources to extract, whose value lies in what they can provide for “us” (non-Indigenous publics), and whose embedded information becomes true “knowledge” only after it has been described and curated within scientific circles, is Colonialism 101.

Most important, and also a reflection of colonialism, is that the narrative deemphasizes why language endangerment is occurring on the unprecedented scale that it is. Indeed, a common statement is that Native American languages are “quickly disappearing,” and that “a language dies when people stop speaking it.” Such tautologies are not helpful. Borrowing conceptually from Newton’s principle that objects in motion stay in motion unless an external force acts upon them, Chikasaw linguist Jenny L. Davis observes that intergenerational transmission of languages continues over time unless an external force disrupts this process. 13 By extension, the external forces should be the focus, yet the dominant narrative largely does not reflect this.

The narrative often does provide some explanation for current trends in language “loss” by referencing broad factors such as globalization, education, or language shame. Some narrators identify unequal power relations explicitly. However, the narrative rarely engages the deeper forces that facilitate these unequal power relations and related inequities. Missing, for instance, is critical engagement with how globalization is not merely a story of the world’s populations getting closer due to travel and technologies, but crucially also a story of colonialism and imperialism. Missing are critical examinations of how policies, such as what languages are used and taught in schools, are indexed to nation-building and nation-­eradicating practices that are themselves linked to colonialism and imperialism. Language attitudes, particularly shame toward one’s language(s) of heritage, can have large effects and are worth studying. The problem occurs when the narrative presents language shame as the source of language shift, rather than an outcome of oppression.

Sometimes the narrative includes explanations that superficially may come across as reasonable or self-evident. Referencing “economic pressures,” for example, some versions explain that members of minoritized language communities adopt languages of wider use to get jobs. However, beyond failing to query the economic injustices that often characterize these situations, the narrative frequently omits key linguistic principles that bring such explanations into question. Multilingualism is the historical and contemporary norm in most parts of the world, and people can and do learn additional languages while maintaining those they already have. Nevertheless, the narrative naturalizes Native American communities’ wholesale replacement of their original languages. Along with “wouldn’t it be better if we all spoke one language?”-type arguments that dismiss the harms of language shift, the narrative misses how language maintenance and reclamation occur in contexts of multilingualism, which has long been the norm across Native North America. 14

And sometimes the implied reason for communities such as my own shifting entirely to English is that it just happened. Native American language loss is a natural result of progress — unfortunate, yet inevitable, and in Native Americans’ best interest, helping them to be part of modern American society . This colonial rationale evokes logics of Social Darwinism that have long been debunked in anthropological sciences but remain robust in wider society, as a quick perusal of reader comments for popular articles about “dying” languages shows.

The truth is that contemporary Native American language shift is primarily an outcome of oppression, a point that many members of Native American communities can explain easily because we experience the effects of settler colonialism, racism, and other - ism s daily. Major examples include land dispossession through forced relocations and environmental degradation, policies aimed toward language eradication, violent disruptions to cultural practices (with some even made illegal), and assimilatory education through missions and boarding schools. Added to these are wider issues that adversely affect language maintenance in general, such as the hegemony of English and other pressures discussed by other authors in this volume.

In critical scholarship, language endangerment is theorized and responded to in complex ways, engaging issues such as those summarized above. Recent Native American language shift reflects what critical language scholars such as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas refer to as linguicide , which is anchored in linguicism : “ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, regulate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language.” 15 But linguicism is not the frame that the narrative espouses. Instead, it focuses on the “disappearance” of Native American languages, with little attention to the oppressions that created and reinforce this outcome.

In response, I next explore these stories of oppression and linguicide — those that are not prominent in the narrative but that regularly come up in my discussions with other Native Americans. These are the stories that must be shared, honestly acknowledged, and responded to. Again, owing to my experiences and relations as a Miami person, I draw heavily on examples from my own community.

I begin with literal displacement via land theft. Despite a series of treaties by Miami leaders with the U.S. government stating that the original Miami homelands in Indiana and surrounding areas would remain Miami forever, our community was split in 1846 when many families — including my direct ­ancestors — were forcibly removed from these lands to a reservation in Kansas by U.S. agents. Traditional Miami cultural practices, which reflect relationships to particular homelands, were, of course, disrupted. And then in a second removal in the late 1860s, several Miamis, though not all–again, splitting the community beyond what had already occurred in 1846–were sent to Indian Territory (present-­day Oklahoma), further disrupting community lifeways. This second removal was followed by individual land allotments through legislation similar to the broader U.S. policy (Dawes Act) to socialize Native Americans into Euro-Western relationships with land as individual property and capital. 16 As with this allotment policy, which applied to members of many Native American nations, the Miami removals themselves also reflected a broader policy: the U.S. government’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. 17 For this reason, though the details vary, the examples from my community parallel those of many Native American nations, particularly those whose homelands are in what is now the eastern part of the United States.

Shortly after the bulk of removals and displacements, the U.S. government ­adopted a policy of assimilatory education of tribal youth via federally operated Indian boarding schools, which several of my Miami ancestors attended. When these institutions are (sometimes) mentioned in the dominant narrative, the illustrative detail is that they forbade the use of Indian languages and physically punished children who broke this rule. This is true and clearly important, but there is much more to consider. The fundamental assumption underlying these institutions was that Indian cultures and knowledge systems were “savage” and needed to be eradicated. In addition to their practices of blatant cultural genocide along with additional abuses, these schools ruptured tribal relationships; children were literally removed from their homes and kinship networks.

Although there are many stories of resistance, Indian boarding schools’ objectives were largely realized. Not only did the use and transmission of many children’s tribal languages end, these children were also inculcated with ideologies to justify this linguicide. I have long been haunted by an interview with a Miami Elder who had gone to boarding school in the early 1900s and stated that “it done the Indian children just a lot of good.” She explained that visitors came from the eastern part of the United States to make sure the children were speaking English, and that she worked in the sewing room at the school five days a week but on weekends went to church and Sunday school. She emphasized how on Sundays, they didn’t get supper but instead got a piece of apple pie and gingerbread, and that she would never forget that apple pie! 18 But she did forget — perhaps was forced to “forget” — our tribal language.

Other boarding school survivors share their experiences of language oppression more directly, as with the following story from a Warm Springs Elder:

Before I went to the boarding school, I was speaking [a Native American language], and all my sisters and brothers were speaking it. That’s all we spoke, and then we got into boarding school and we were not allowed to speak. And I grew up believing that it was something very bad, because we got punished, or switched, and so they just kind of beat it out of me . . . . That boarding school did bad stuff to us, and they took the most important thing, which was our language. 19

As Diné scholar James McKenzie explains in an essay directed to applied linguists, trauma experienced directly by boarding school survivors, which in many cases extends far beyond language oppression to include physical and sexual violence, does not end with the survivors themselves. 20 Instead, the trauma can be passed on to subsequent generations, continuing to harm individual and community well-being until something intervenes. Language reclamation can address this trauma by helping people to (re)establish healthy relationships with their languages and what those languages represent in their respective community contexts and cosmologies.

Around the same time as the development and spread of Indian boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. government increasingly adopted policies and promoted nationalist narratives that furthered an ideal of English monolingualism. Even though the earlier historical record of settler life in the United States documents a landscape of many languages and more acceptance of language diversity, the notion that English was the language of the United States became increasingly promoted as an imagined original American trait. 21 This belief, which remains strong today, impedes the maintenance of Native American (and other) languages.

Linguistic justice calls for sharing stories such as those above, which though highly abridged can at least point to recurring themes of oppression, thereby facilitating the detailed discussions that need to occur. But sharing stories of colonial violence or the hegemony of English disrupts contemporary power structures, so stories such as those of boarding school survivors tend to be pushed to the margins. Whether by misattributing fault onto language communities or by just ignoring the agents of language oppression entirely, the narrative often works against justice by engaging a strategy that Davis calls erasure of colonial agency . Complementing this is a strategy of removing languages from their relational contexts. Davis describes the latter as linguistic extraction , the process of documenting, describ­ing, preserving, or otherwise engaging with languages separately from the social and political contexts of their historical and contemporary use and users. 22

Both strategies occur in dominant endangered languages narratives, which adopt and naturalize “endangered languages” as the unit of focus as opposed to the broader process of endangerment. This frame of “endangered languages” reinforces a theory of languages as objects: named, bounded sets of grammatical patterns and vocabulary that can be counted, analyzed, or lost. Indeed, research by language scientists, which as shown throughout the essays in this volume has great potential to promote social justice, can also foster harm by rendering languages into disembodied data or objects whose primary value lies in what they contribute to science. I emphasize that it is common in Native American communities for languages and peoplehood to be heavily intertwined. 23 In such contexts, objectifying the language by emphasizing, for example, what its grammar reveals for science easily objectifies the people who claim the language.

Unfortunately, as extractive models of Indigenous language research remain sanctioned in normative research practices, associated framing is common in the dominant narrative. For instance, it regularly includes queries about how Native American languages contribute to “our knowledge,” where “our” is contextually referring to members of dominant groups, such as language scientists. Asking “What do we lose when a language dies?” has a similar overtone, especially when relayed in a context with few or no Indigenous people. This noted, it is not my opinion that wider society cannot or should not appreciate and learn from Indigenous languages. The problem is rather that these queries too often lack important counterparts, such as “What does colonialism have to do with it?”

It is common in Linguistics to categorize and theorize “endangered languages” through biological metaphors such as living and dying . This practice, which also occurs in Indigenous communities, is not surprising, given that using language is so intertwined with human life experience. Moreover, language endangerment, like biological species endangerment, occurs when environments have been seriously disrupted. If employed to express these links, the use of biological metaphors could facilitate social justice by calling attention to the issues that must be addressed to reverse language shift. In general, however, use of biological metaphors warrants great caution. In the narrative, Native American language shift is normally framed unidirectionally (only away from the original languages) using categories that represent increasingly severe stages of endangerment and end at extinction . This is highly problematic. 24

Actual extinction of a biological species is normally understood as a lost cause, an irreversible eventuality. By extension, if a language is “extinct,” interventions that could promote its future use, such as funding language programs, are illogical, hopeless, and unlikely to be supported. But here the species extinction metaphor fails. Using language is an action, not an object. A community may stop using its original language, but they can also start using it again so long as there are records of the language to learn from and people who are able and empowered to do this work.

In masking these and related possibilities, extinction narratives are a form of oppression. They are also entrenched. I have on many occasions related the story of how my tribal language had been declared “extinct” by linguists before the Miami people reclaimed it as a language of everyday use. Although Miami people assert our linguistic sovereignty by explaining that our language was just “sleeping” for about thirty years, some scholars continue to describe myaamiaataweenki as “extinct.” This is just one of the many contradictions supported by the dominant endangered languages narrative, whose strength in guiding theory likely at least partly explains why public sources such as Wikipedia have continued to describe my community’s language as “extinct,” despite ample evidence otherwise. 25

Even more serious than masking possibilities for language reclamation, the logic of language extinction intersects with the dominant narrative’s focus on “endangered languages” in a way that goes beyond erasing the underlying oppressions of language endangerment to also erase their continued presence. That language shift is “complete” does not mean these oppressions have even been identified, let alone corrected. The intergenerational trauma from boarding school experiences, for example, does not stop when a community’s language has gone out of use. Rather, it stops when communities can engage in and are supported in healing, and in rebuilding the relationships that boarding schools violently severed. Similarly, ruptures between communities and their lands do not stop when language shift is complete. Rather, they stop through interventions that restore those relationships, a process that requires decolonization and supporting activism such as the LandBack movement. 26

The dominant endangered languages narrative fails to support language recovery because it puts the focus on results of oppressions, rather than on identifying and dismantling the oppressions. But it does not have to be this way. I conclude with possible changes and actions.

First, rather than lamenting how languages “disappear” or “vanish,” I propose highlighting the agents of language shift through queries such as, “Who or what is oppressing these language communities?” From this vantage, the central question is no longer about what an undefined “we” lose when languages go out of use, but instead about changing social dynamics, a process that requires identifying structures of oppression and stopping them. This is a social justice approach, situated in an honest account of the historical and contemporary factors that underlie language shift in places like North America. Anthropologist Gerald Roche gets to the heart of what a social justice–oriented narrative could emphasize:

Speakers and signers of Indigenous and minoritized languages have repeatedly explained that their languages are endangered due to failures of social justice — the oppression, marginalization, stigmatization, exclusion, deprivation, and so on — that take place in the context of imperial, colonial, and nationalist domination. 27

Beyond working to reverse the injustices created by this domination, the second key to an alternative narrative is a focus on reclamation, and what non-­Indigenous agents and institutions can do to support it. Shifting the unit of analysis away from “endangered languages,” which focuses on languages rather than the peoples who claim them, is crucial to this narrative. “Language endangerment” is an improvement, as it references a process rather than objects, but better yet would be to position community language ecologies as the anchor for the story. Language ecologies are the ways in which languages exist in their environments, and an ecological approach thus inherently emphasizes place (which is especially fundamental to Indigenous communities) along with sociopolitical, economic, and other factors in language shift and recovery. An ecological approach emphasizes relationships, which as noted earlier must in some way have been severely changed or damaged in order for language shift to have occurred. Unlike the dominant narrative’s focus, this approach firmly engages the multiple oppressions those communities have experienced and continue to experience, while also drawing attention to their rights, needs, goals, and futures.

Finally, following from the last point is the importance of prioritizing the lived experiences of members of Native American language communities when planning and executing language work. Roche notes that dominant approaches to theorizing language endangerment largely miss the political factors and lead to “a ­refusal to sincerely hear the voices of the linguistically oppressed.” 28 I follow Roche’s observation that many members of oppressed language communities are already explaining the causes of language endangerment and sharing stories of language reclamation, and yet we are not fully being heard or seen. 29 In Native North America, where settler colonial logics teach that Native Americans for the most part no longer really exist, this is to be expected; and by extension, the stories we relate and the needs we articulate are easily dismissed by dominant discourses and the actions they promote. As shown throughout the essays in this volume, however, many tools to address these injustices already exist. The question is whether people with power are willing to engage them.

author’s note

A Dean’s Professorship at the University of California, Riverside Center for Ideas and Society funded through a Mellon Foundation Investments in Humanities Faculty Grant supported work on this essay.

• 1 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “ International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032 ” (accessed June 12, 2023).
• 2 I follow the convention of capitalizing Indigenous when used as an ethnopolitical identifier to specific original peoples.
• 3 This statement appears on one of the main UNESCO websites for the IDIL . See UNESCO , ­“ Indigenous Languages Decade (2022–2032) ” (accessed July 25, 2023).
• 4 An Act to Reauthorize the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978 and the Navajo Community College Act, 101st Congress, 04 Stat. 1152, Public Law 101-477, October 30, 1990.
• 5 For an overview of the language reclamation framework, see Wesley Y. Leonard, “Contesting Extinction through a Praxis of Language Reclamation,” in Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures , ed. Suzanne M. McCullagh, Luis I. Prádanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, and Catherine Wagner (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2021), 143–159.
• 6 Onowa McIvor and Teresa L. McCarty, “ Indigenous Bilingual and Revitalization-­Immersion Education in Canada and the USA ,” in Bilingual and Multilingual Education , 3rd edition, ed. Ofelia García, Angel M. Y. Lin, and Stephen May (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Cham, 2016), 422.
• 7 I capitalize the names of academic fields to recognize that they are proper nouns, each with specific sets of questions, methods, goals, and personnel.
• 8 Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser, “ Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic Intersections of Gender, Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization ,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 115–129.
• 9 Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “ Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education ,” The Urban Review 37 (5) (2005): 425–446.
• 10 Eve Tuck, “ Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities ,” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3) (2009): 409–427.
• 11 Michael Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” Language 68 (1) (1992): 4.
• 12 Lyle Campbell and Eve Okura, “New Knowledge Produced by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages ,” in Cataloguing the World’s Endangered Languages , ed. Lyle Campbell and Anna Belew (New York: Routledge, 2018), 79.
• 13 Jenny L. Davis, “ Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous Language Survivance ,” Language Documentation and Description 14 (2017): 41.
• 14 McIvor and McCarty, “Indigenous Bilingual and Revitalization-Immersion Education,” 3.
• 15 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, “ Linguicism ,” in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2015).
• 16 An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations (General Allotment Act or Dawes Act), 49th Congress, 2nd Session, Stat. 24, 388–391, December 6, 1886 (codified as 25 U.S.C. ch. 9 § 331 et seq.).
• 17 An Act to Provide for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and For Their Removal West of the River Mississippi (Indian Removal Act), 21st Congress, 4 Stat. 411, signed into law May 28, 1830.
• 18 This example comes from a series of Miami Elder interviews in the late 1960s that I accessed through Miami tribal archives. For reasons of privacy, I omit identifying details.
• 19 Quoted in Erin Flynn Haynes, “ When Support for Language Revitalization Is Not Enough: The End of Indigenous Language Classes at Warm Springs Elementary School ,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 209 (2011): 143.
• 20 James McKenzie, “ Addressing Historical Trauma and Healing in Indigenous Language Cultivation and Revitalization ,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 42 (2022): 71–77.
• 21 April Linton, “ Language Politics and Policy in the United States: Implications for the Immigration Debate ,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 199 (2009): 9–37.
• 22 Davis, “Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment,” 40–45.
• 23 Wesley Y. Leonard, “ Producing Language Reclamation by Decolonising ‘Language ,’” ­ Language Documentation and Description 14 (2017): 15–36.
• 24 I detail the harm of this trajectory along with the underlying logics and effects of these biological metaphors in Leonard, “Contesting Extinction.” See also Bernard C. Perley, “ Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices ,” Anthropological Forum 22 (2) (2012): 133–149.
• 25 Leonard, “Contesting Extinction.”
• 26 Also written as two words (“Land Back”), this movement calls for and develops strategies to return lands to the control of their original caretakers. See LandBack .
• 27 Gerald Roche, “Abandoning Endangered Languages: Ethical Loneliness, Language Oppression, and Social Justice,” American Anthropologist 122 (1) (2020): 164.
• 29 For example, a 2021 issue of WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship focuses on “Indigenous Language Revitalization: Innovation, Reflection and Future Directions.” See WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship 16 (1) (2021). For an example from a previous issue of Dædalus , see Teresa L. McCarty, Sheilah E. Nicholas, Kari A. B. Chew, Natalie G. Diaz, Wesley Y. Leonard, and Louellyn White, “ Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices: Storywork as Theory and Praxis in Indigenous-Language Reclamation ,” Dædalus 147 (2) (2018): 160–172.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Forgetting My First Language

By Jenny Liao

No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my first language. It doesn’t feel like the sudden, sharp pain of losing someone you love, but rather a dull ache that builds slowly until it becomes a part of you. My first language, Cantonese, is the only one I share with my parents, and, as it slips from my memory, I also lose my ability to communicate with them. When I tell people this, their eyes tend to grow wide with disbelief, as if it’s so absurd that I must be joking. “They can’t speak English?” they ask. “So how do you talk to your parents?” I never have a good answer. The truth is, I rely on translation apps and online dictionaries for most of our conversations.

It’s strange when I hear myself say that I have trouble talking to my parents, because I still don’t quite believe it myself. We speak on the phone once a week and the script is the same: “Have you eaten yet?” my father asks in Cantonese. Long pause. “No, not yet. You?” I reply. “Why not? It’s so late,” my mother cuts in. Long pause. “Remember to drink more water and wear a mask outside,” she continues. “O.K. You too.” Longest pause. “We’ll stop bothering you, then.” The conversation is shallow but familiar. Deviating from it puts us (or, if I’m being honest, just me) at risk of discomfort, which I try to avoid at all costs.

I grew up during the nineties in Sheepshead Bay, a quiet neighborhood located in the southern tip of Brooklyn, where the residents were mostly Russian-Jewish immigrants. Unable to communicate with neighbors, my parents kept to themselves and found other ways to participate in American culture. Once a month, my dad attempted to re-create McDonald’s chicken nuggets at home for my two brothers and me before taking us to the Coney Island boardwalk to watch the Cyclone roller coaster rumble by. On Sundays, my mom brought me to violin lessons, and afterward I accompanied her to a factory in Chinatown where she sacrificed her day off to sew blouses to pay for my next lesson while I did homework. These constant acts of love—my parents’ ideas of Americana—shaped who I am today. Why is it so difficult for me, at age thirty-two, to have a meaningful discussion with them? As an adult, I feel like their acquaintance instead of their daughter.

During my visits back home from California, our time together is quiet, our conversations brief. My parents ask about my life in Cantonese over plates of siu yuk and choy sum while I clumsily piece together incomplete sentences peppered with English in response. I have so much to say, but the Cantonese words are just out of reach, my tongue unable to retrieve them after being neglected in favor of English for so long. I feel emptier with each visit, like I’m losing not only my connection to my parents but also fragments of my Chinese heritage. Can I call myself Chinese if I barely speak the language?

My parents taught me my first words: naai , when I was hungry for milk, and gai , when I was hungry for chicken. I was born in New York City and spent most of my childhood, in Brooklyn, speaking Cantonese, since it was (and still is) the only language that my parents understand. In the nineteen-eighties, they immigrated to the U.S. from Guangdong, a province in southern China. The jobs they found in hot kitchens and cramped garment factories came with long hours, leaving them no time to learn English. As a result, my parents relied heavily on the Chinese community in New York to survive. I looked forward to running errands with my mother in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where I heard Cantonese spoken all around me in grocery stores, doctors’ offices, and hair salons. On special occasions, we would yum cha with my mother’s friends and eat my favorite dim-sum dishes like cheung fun and pai gwut while they praised my voracious appetite. At home, we watched “Journey to the West,” a popular Hong Kong television series that aired on TVB, and listened to catchy Cantopop songs by Jacky Cheung on repeat. Before I started school, my only friends were the children of other Cantonese-speaking immigrants, with whom I bonded over our shared love of White Rabbit candies and fruit-jelly cups. Cantonese surrounded every aspect of my life; it was all I knew.

When I first learned English in elementary school, I became bilingual quickly with help from English-as-a-second-language classes. I switched back and forth seamlessly between the two languages, running through multiplication tables with my mother in Cantonese and, in the same breath, telling my brother in English that I hated math. I attended my parent-teacher conferences as a translator for my mother despite the obvious conflict of interest; “Jenny is an excellent student over all but needs just a little more help with math,” my third-grade teacher said, which I’d relay to my mom with pride only after redacting the bit about math.

It wasn’t an issue that my math skills weren’t strong. My parents encouraged me to excel in English class because they believed it to be the key to success in America, even if they never learned the language. English would aid in my performance across all subjects in school because that was the language my teachers taught in. But, most important, my parents believed that a mastery of English would promise a good, stable job in the future. This missing piece in my parents’ lives would propel me forward for the rest of mine.

Before long, I learned that there was also significant social currency in adopting English as a primary language. Outside of E.S.L. class, I encountered the first of many “ching chongs” shouted my way. “Do you know that’s what you sound like?” a kid asked, laughing. I did not know, because “ching chong” had never come out of my mouth before. Still, it went on to be a common taunt I endured, along with “No speaky Engrish?,” even though I spoke English. I was humiliated based on how I looked and the fact that I could speak another language. It was an easy decision to suppress Cantonese in an effort to blend in, to feel more American. This didn’t actually work; instead, I felt a diminished sense of both identities.

As I entered my teen-age years, my social circle shifted. I attended Brooklyn Technical High School, where the students were predominantly Asian. For the first time since I was a preschooler, most of my friends looked like me. My personality evolved; I became bold, rebellious, and maybe even a bit brash compared with the painfully shy wallflower I had played in the past. I dyed my hair magenta and shoplifted makeup for the thrill. Upon meeting other Chinese American students who spoke English at home with their parents, I became furious that my parents weren’t bilingual, too. If they valued English so much and knew how necessary it was in this country, why didn’t they do whatever it took to learn it? “Mommy and Baba had to start working. We had no money. We had no time. We needed to raise you and your brothers.” All I heard were excuses. I resented them for what I thought was laziness, an absence of sense and foresight that they should have had as my protectors. When I continued to be subjected to racial slurs even after my English had become pitch-perfect, I blamed my parents. Any progress I made towards acceptance in America was negated by their lack of assimilation. With nowhere to channel my fury, I spoke English to my parents, knowing that they couldn’t understand me. I was cruel; I called them hurtful names and belittled their intelligence. I used English, a language they admired, against them.

Over time, Cantonese played a more minor role in my life. When I went away for college at Syracuse University, I heard it less often. After starting my first advertising job, I spoke it infrequently. And now, as an adult living thousands of miles away from my family, I understand it rarely. It served no purpose in my life other than to humor my parents when they called me.

My fluency eroded so gradually through the years that there isn’t a definitive moment when my vocabulary became less extensive, my grammar less polished. It didn’t occur to me that my Cantonese was regressing well beyond the tip of my tongue until it was too late. First, my directions were off. I started saying jau , which means “right,” when I meant to say zo , which means “left.” This caused my dad to make wrong turns when I navigated in his car. Then, the names of colors started to escape me. “I like your green dress,” I said to my mom in Cantonese once. “This is blue, silly!” she laughed. And a couple of years ago, I tried replicating my grandma’s steamed-egg recipe but asked my dad how she used to pan-fry them. “You mean ‘steam,’ right?” He intrinsically knew how to decipher my broken Cantonese. Eventually, I struggled to construct sentences altogether, often mispronouncing words or failing completely to recall them.

The struggle to retain my first language feels isolating but isn’t unique; it’s a shared pain common among first- and second-generation immigrants. This phenomenon is known as first-language attrition , the process of forgetting a first or native language. My brothers are further along in this process—they have more trouble communicating with my parents than I do. They’re both older than I am by nearly a decade, so they’ve had more time to forget. The frustration is palpable when they rummage through what’s left of their Cantonese to make small talk, whether it’s describing the weather or pointing out what’s on TV.

My closest friends include first-generation Chinese Americans who also have fraught relationships with their parents. Our group chats read like a Cantonese 101 class: “How do you say . . . ,” “What’s the word for . . . ,” “What’s the difference between . . .” Emotional connections between a child and parent are weakened if the only language they share is also the language being forgotten. This is the case for many children of immigrants; to “succeed” in America, we must adopt a new language in place of our first—the one our parents speak best—without fully considering the strain it places on our relationships for the rest of our lives.

There are many milestones I wish I could have shared with my parents—awards I’ve won, career changes I’ve made, occasions I knew they would have been proud of. But I couldn’t find the words in between the ums and ahs, the never-ending games of charades to explain the happenings in my life. Throughout my career as a strategist in advertising, gwong gou , Cantonese for “advertisement,” was the furthest I got when explaining my job. After I decided to move across the country from New York City to Los Angeles, I didn’t know how to say “California.” Instead, I mangled the translation and strung together the Cantonese words for “other side of America, closer to China.” My parents guessed correctly. “ Gaa zau ?” And, after my now-fiancé proposed, I mistakenly told my parents, “I’m married!” My mother thought she had missed a wedding that hadn’t happened yet, all because I didn’t know the word for “engaged.” It took a few rounds of online searches to find the Cantonese translation (most translation apps default to Mandarin), coupled with a photo of my engagement ring, before my mother understood.

It’s deeply disorienting to have thoughts that I so eagerly want to share with my parents but which are impossible to express. Cantonese no longer feels natural, and sometimes even feels ridiculous, for me to speak. My parents and I have no heart-to-heart conversations, no mutual understanding, on top of cultural and generational gaps to reckon with. My mother has a habit of following her sentences with “Do you understand what I’m saying?” More often than not, I don’t. She hasn’t mastered translation apps yet, but, like me, she’ll resort to using synonyms and simpler phrases until I’m able to piece her words together. My heart aches, knowing there’s a distance between us that may never fully be bridged.

On my mom’s sixty-fourth birthday, at the peak of the pandemic , I became increasingly anxious over her mortality, compounded by the preëxisting health conditions that put her more at risk. My parents may look younger than their ages suggest, but there’s no avoiding the fact that we have a limited amount of time together. Did I really want to spend the rest of our lives with a language barrier between us? I made it a goal to relearn Cantonese, and, ultimately, rebuild the relationship with my parents. I attempt conversations with the kind women behind the bun counter at Taipan, my favorite bakery in Manhattan’s Chinatown, or the waiters at East Harbor Seafood Palace, my go-to Cantonese restaurant in Brooklyn. I listen to Jacky Cheung these days on Spotify instead of a cassette tape and transport myself back to my parents’ living room. I watch Wong Kar-wai movies like “ In the Mood for Love ” and hang on to each of Maggie Cheung’s beautifully spoken words, repeating them over and over until I get the tones just right. But, most of all, I call my parents and stammer through more meaningful conversations with them, no matter how challenging it gets.

Looking back, forfeiting the language passed on to me from my parents was the cost of assimilation. I don’t view this as a blemish on my family’s narrative but rather as a symbol of our perseverance. I feel pangs of guilt when I have trouble interacting with my parents, but I remind myself not to be discouraged. During a recent chat, I mentioned a fund-raiser that I had hosted for Heart of Dinner, an organization that delivers fresh meals and groceries to Asian seniors experiencing food insecurity in New York City. I deployed all of the translation tools in my arsenal to explain my motivation for fund-raising, fumbling through one of our longest conversations. The nuances would be lost in translation, but I punched the words in anyway: anti-Asian violence, isolation, elderly Asians afraid of leaving home, pandemic. It was a hot papier-mâché mess of an explanation, but, like my blatantly incorrect request for my grandmother’s egg recipe, they still understood. “ Gum ho sum! ” Such a good heart.

Our weekly calls are livelier now. I have a backlog of topics and no idea how to broach them, but, armed with my phone and a bit of patience, I’m up for the challenge. Though Cantonese no longer feels natural for me to speak, it will always be my first language—even if it takes a few translation apps and a lifetime for us to get reacquainted.

New Yorker Favorites

• What happens when a bad-tempered, distractible doofus runs an empire?
• Remembering the murder you did not commit.
• The repressive, authoritarian soul of Thomas the Tank Engine.
• The mystery of people who speak dozens of languages .
• Margaret Atwood, the prophet of dystopia .
• The many faces of women who identify as witches .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Adam Iscoe

By John Paul Brammer

By David D. Kirkpatrick

By Ronan Farrow

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Speaking Russian in America

By Sasha Vasilyuk

Ms. Vasilyuk is the author of the novel “Your Presence Is Mandatory.” She wrote from San Francisco.

In January 2022, I was planning a summer trip to Ukraine and Russia for my 4-year-old son and me.

I spent half of my childhood in Ukraine and half in Russia before moving to the United States when I was a teenager. When I became a parent, my one, obsessive goal — as a mother raising a child in America with a man who spoke only English — was to teach my son Russian. It wasn’t about his future résumé; it was because Russian forms such a deep-rooted part of my immigrant identity that I couldn’t imagine talking to my child in another language.

I spoke to him exclusively in Russian and found him a Russian-language day care. For three years, his Russian was better than his English. But when he turned 4 and made English-speaking friends, it started to slip. He started inserting English words in otherwise Russian sentences and talking to himself in English while playing alone.

Then, after a Christmas break with his American grandma, he spoke to me in English. I panicked. I decided he needed a full immersion as soon as possible.

A visit to Ukraine and Russia would allow him to see that his mother’s native language wasn’t a quirk of hers but something normal for millions of people. I told him he’d eat piroshki , see the circus and finally meet his cousins in Kyiv and Moscow.

One month later, Russian forces poured into Ukraine.

I did not immediately tell my son a war had started. I believe in telling children the truth, but I couldn’t even explain to myself why one of my homelands was invading the other, why my cousins in Kyiv were hiding in bomb shelters, why my cousins in Moscow were fleeing the country. Maybe I’d tell him once I had a better grasp of what was happening or, better yet, when it was over. I was certain that it wouldn’t — couldn’t — last long.

For two days, I called family in Ukraine in the early morning, before he woke up, and reserved my tears for nights. On the third day, we were hiking in a park when two American women approached and asked what language we were speaking. When I said, “Russian,” their faces contorted, and one of them said, “Oops,” as if they’d caught me doing something wrong.

If I’d been on my own, I might have said that the Russian language, spoken by many in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics where Russian was mandated, is not an indicator of political or moral affiliation with the actions of Vladimir Putin. But I wasn’t on my own, and I didn’t want my son to see his mother having to defend herself. We hurried on down the hill. When he asked me why that lady had said “Oops,” I said I had no idea.

Afterward, I grew self-conscious at stores and playgrounds and tried not to speak Russian to him too loudly.

One of Mr. Putin’s bogus reasons for the invasion was to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, even though many Russian speakers — like my family — had felt perfectly safe in their bilingual country. As tanks rolled toward Kyiv, I thought about the effort and resources I’d expended teaching my son a language that was being used as an excuse for violence. I’d entangled him in a mess that he did not have to be a part of.

Many people in Ukraine vowed to stop speaking Russian, but that didn’t feel like the right solution for us. I decided to carry on as we were and say nothing about the war until and unless he asked.

I read articles by psychologists that recommended never lying to your children, even about distressing events; they cautioned that it’s important to dole out the truth in a limited, age-appropriate manner. I found an article that said to “ask yourself whether you are lying to benefit your kids or lying more to benefit yourself.” I had a hard time separating the two. I knew that compared with my relatives in Russia and Ukraine, I was lucky to have the choice to lie at all.

I’ve read reports of parents in war zones going to extreme lengths to hide the brutality of war from their children, even as they live it. Part of me thinks that this merciful lying is a biological instinct, that it’s somehow better for the survival of the species to allow our children to believe the world is better than it is.

But it can also be cultural. Soviet history, for example, contains a lot of private grief under a gilded collective exterior. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in World War II. He hid it from us his whole life because in the twisted moral code of the Soviet Union, P.O.W.s were considered almost traitors . My family learned of his secret only after his death, when we discovered a confession letter in which he begged the K.G.B. not to tell us because he didn’t want to traumatize us with his shame. I never really understood that until Russia invaded.

As the war dragged on, the summer of our planned trip came and went. My son didn’t notice, and I thanked his child brain’s nebulous sense of time for sparing me the need to explain. That November, he turned 5. I increased his dose of Russian-language cartoons and started to teach him to read in Russian.

Then one day he came home from day care and asked, “Mama, is there a war in Ukraine?”

A mix of panic and relief washed over me. We went to the world map on the wall of his bedroom, designed by a friend from Kyiv. I showed him the outline of Ukraine, with its little cartoons of borscht and onion-domed churches. I said something about tanks, about how terrible war was. He nodded silently. I kept it limited and age-appropriate. I also omitted a crucial piece: He did not ask me who started the war, and I didn’t tell him. I could not bring myself to volunteer that it was Russia.

A few months later, I saw my son make a beeline for a Russian-speaking family on the beach. When I caught up, they were asking him — and then me — where we were from. Their tone was urgent, insistent. They needed to know we weren’t from Russia; they had recently arrived in the United States from Kherson, Ukraine. As soon as I heard “Kherson,” I sent my son off to play. Their son was just a few years older, and he seemed to be traumatized, alternating between staring into space and angry outbursts at his grandma. I listened to how the family had survived a brutal six-month Russian occupation and watched my son play in the distance.

Let his little brain know about suffering. But not about Russia’s betrayal. Not yet.

Sasha Vasilyuk is the author of the novel “ Your Presence Is Mandatory .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , X and Threads .