I know Hawaii has some for Hawaiian, but being from NC it’s so sad to see the Cherokee language dying out, being one of the only native North American languages with a writing system. I kind of wish we had the option to learn native languages in public schools.

42 comments

  1. I just doubt it would get much traction. It’s a hard political sell to spend money on a language very few people speak.

    I could see it done as an extracurricular activity by a tribe or other organization.

  2. I definitely would! New York already offers everything from Latin to Hebrew (depending on districts) so I don’t see how adding native languages to New York would be anything but helpful

  4. If local districts/schools want to be immersive language schools I have no problem with that. That’s one of the positives of having many districts and local control of education.

  5. I would be fine with increased government support for the teaching of indigenous languages, particularly among indigenous people.

  7. Dual immersion classes in elementary are awesome but require a lot of commitment from schools and the parents whose children participate in them. I’m very supportive of them but think that it would be rough to properly support programs for dying languages.

    In the programs that I am familiar with, there tends to be a lot of demand from families that don’t speak the language being taught but see the value in their children learning it. The programs I am familiar with are also designed around having students that are conversant in both languages in the class to serve as models
    for their peers.

  9. No, if a particular school or organization wants to do it with their own funds, I wouldn’t be averse.

    But I do not pay taxes for classes in extremely niche languages with almost no utility.

  10. Nah, there’s better stuff to spend tax money on. An after school club that learns native languages? Sure!

  13. I’m not opposed to it but Pennsylvania has such a low Native American population that I doubt there’d be anyone to teach

  14. No.

    Kids don’t need to learn dying languages specifically because they’re dying. It’s not a function of government to keep dying cultures alive. That’s the job of people in that culture.

  16. As an elective enrichment course, sure. But teaching a bunch of non-indigenous kids a language that is not part of their culture will not be effective at saving a dying language.

  17. There’s a growing Spanish speaking population in my area, as well as a large deaf community. It makes more sense to offer Spanish and ASL over native languages.

  19. The intricacies of taxes/state funding and how that’s allocated to school districts and with what strings is beyond my pay grade. However, I’m supportive of the schools offering any languages they can.

    My school district in Texas offered a variety of language classes since foreign language was part of the curriculum. Obviously being Texas, Spanish was available at all middle and high schools but things like ASL, French, German, Latin, Mandarin, etc. were only available at the high schools and even then some languages were only offered on certain campuses given staffing limitations. However, students from all schools (middle and high school) could still enroll in those classes provided they had transportation between campuses.

    So I feel like that’s a more realistic approach to teaching a dying language than trying to create an entire school dedicated to it. I mean if my school district only had one or two teachers who taught French for example, then trying to staff an entire school of people who speak a dying language in multiple places in each state might make that idea a non-starter regardless of how much money is set aside for it.

  22. No. I would not support that. We have spanish immersion schools in my area, and that would be immensely more helpful for people to learn. Learning a native language will be useless to the vast majority of people.

  24. I would say it would make more sense in terms of a federal grant for tribes and community colleges/community centers to set up. Basic instruction in public schools would have been nothing but wasted dollars in my hometown as the population was pretty much white and Mexican. And mine wasn’t the only pretty much white town. I feel like the state has a hard enough time barely maintaining basic programs like foster care, public schools, utility/ rent assistance and Medicaid to really be launching that type of program. But federal would be able to put the money in the areas that would actually use that type of program.

  25. I would not support this.
     

    So few people use and speak the language, most of which will just forget after a few years because they don’t use it outside of class.
     

    That is a lot of money that doesn’t help people.

  26. I think native groups should have enough funding so that they have options for keeping their own languages alive among their own peoples (and if they want to teach them to others, that’s great too). I don’t think trying to teach them en-mass to nonnative students is really the best use of student time and education resources though. I tend to think local school districts ought to be able to make choices about which languages they want to teach themselves, since I feel like there are a lot of local considerations about which languages make the most sense to teach in which communities.

  27. I think that’s a really good idea. While I don’t think you’d see street signs in Algonquian any time soon, it would be a good measure to make sure the languages are preserved (by producing demand for teachers) and would promote appreciation for the pre-Columbian culture of this continent.

  28. Required – no. There are other languages more common and useful to learn. As interesting as it sounds, the reality is that those languages are spoken natively by a very small number of people and it just isn’t practical, especially for small school systems with no native speakers. Seriously, how would a school in Montana even go about hiring someone who spoke Cherokee?

    If schools want to offer it as an elective that’s fine, maybe the government could offer a subsidy to such classes.

  29. No.

    If an individual school wants to offer it as a class, that’s their prerogative.

    Setting aside tax dollars for full blown immersion schools in languages with no practical value would be a colossal waste of money.

  30. Nope. I’m fine with increased federal funding for teaching it in native schools, or they could use some casino money for it if it’s that important. I would be ok with sales tax going toward increased language classes though, not just for dying ones.

  31. Not really, no. And I speak a second language myself. Japanese.

    I suppose I would be ok with something like making a state or federal grant available for application by NPOs.

    The problem is demand really. And applicability. Once you start learning a language, you really need the opportunity AND desire to use it.

  32. Yes.

    Most of the dying languages around here are dying because we killed their users in droves, and were culturally genocidal to the survivors, so I’d view that as a matter of due reparations if it showed up on a ballot.

  33. I dont see it being very popular most people barely remember the language classes they took unless it was for a job they wanted after graduation

  34. I think we kind of owe it to the Navajo, at least. Code talkers did a hell of a lot for the war effort in the 40’s.

  37. Sure, to an extent. CA has something like [50 native tribes though](http://www.native-languages.org/california.htm) (and nearly as many languages), and to say that they were devastated by the [California / US genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide) (and ofc the Spanish missions before that), might be an understatement.

    I’m not really qualified to comment on how intact those tribal languages still *are*, and ofc there’s issues like tribal sovereignty, but in general, yeah, I think CA would be more than justified to spend state money on things like native culture preservation, considering what happened.

    Depends on how you’d actually want to implement this though. Providing funding for stuff like online language programs through universities (or CA community colleges) could certainly make sense. Small, native immersion schools / programs could make sense in some areas (ie. where the actual tribes existed, and still exist today, and *mostly* for native descendants), but would really depend on a case by case basis

    For something like Cherokee that should quite frankly be a no brainier – though ofc you might have a *bit* more difficulty finding funding for something like that outside of the west coast + northeast…

  38. Yeah, I took Navajo in highschool and it’s helped me countless times to be able to communicate with people in my community

  41. I wish they would make them required courses in schools tbh. I realise our language education in the US isn’t the best, but funding native language programs is a necessity to ensure their survival.

    Will it happen? Doubtful, sadly

  42. I think we should have languages offered much earlier, like in elementary school. But those would probably be either Spanish or French to be most useful. I’m all for providing native language in high school or middle school or whatever, but you’d have to find teachers and there’d have to be kids who want to take those classes.

    I feel like a lot of the languages currently offered aren’t taught very well as it is, so maybe we need to first figure out a better system of teaching languages.

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