WILL CHAMORRO DISAPPEAR?

Meet Gyani Maiya Sen.  She has nothing to do with Chamorro.  But maybe she does.

WHEN SHE DIES, SO WILL HER LANGUAGE

She's the last speaker of the language, Kusunda, in Nepal

Like many extinct or endangered languages, a group of people learn a second language, more politically, socially and economically beneficial than their native tongue.  That's the bilingual generation.  Their children understand the native tongue, but use the acquired language more.  Then their children, the third generation, neither speak nor understand much the native tongue, speaking and understanding only the acquired language.

HOW CAN YOU TELL WHEN A LANGUAGE IS DYING?

According to one idea :

 A LANGUAGE IS...                                              WHEN......

EXTINCT	No speakers left
MORIBUND	Small number of speakers, mostly very old
SERIOUSLY ENDANGERED	Youngest good speakers are older than 50
ENDANGERED	Few children learning, youngest good speakers are adult
POTENTIALLY ENDANGERED	Beginning to lose child speakers; socially and economically disadvantanged; losing ground to more powerful language
VIABLE BUT SMALL	Speakers number 1,000+ but strong community, or isolated and identity tied to language
VIABLE	Large and thriving number of speakers of all ages

In my estimation, we on Guam qualify as Seriously Endangered.  I am 50, and I don't count myself a good speaker, and few of my classmates speak it better than me.  The best speakers of Chamorro, in my experience, are over 70 years.  And very few children are learning it, and those children who do speak it speak a basic form of it.  I have seen some who were taught Chamorro as children and who spoke a basic form of Chamorro as children more or less abandon it by the time they reach adolescence when peer approval becomes king.   It might seem to a child to be useful to speak basic Chamorro at home when mommy and daddy are constantly encouraging it and speaking Chamorro to the child.  But when the child enters adolescence and the language is no longer the tool for interacting with peers, the language holds less value for them.

Many young people are catching some Chamorro, but at a very rudimentary level and I don't hear them use Chamorro as the norm among themselves in ordinary situations like when they eat out or go to the movies.

On Saipan, the situation may be less dire, and could be at the Endangered level.  The children are certainly no longer learning it and speaking it, from my interaction with them.  Those in their 20s are less proficient; those 30 and up are better in Chamorro.

I suppose the situation might be better in Rota and Tinian but I don't know, except for isolated visits there recently where I detected that the children were no longer speaking Chamorro, but the 20-something were, though mixing a lot of English in it, too.

WRITING IT ALL DOWN

The linguists and ethnologists are all running to Gyani Maiya Sen to record her and write down as much as they can about the language.  But when she dies, and all we're left with is a book or tapes, the soul will be gone.  The body (words) may be recorded, but languages are living things.  Imagine you learning all your Russian from a book, with not a single other person to speak with in Russian.  After mastering the book, and meeting a Russian, you and the Russian will still have some communication issues, compared to two people who learned the language from a lived context.