Instead, Hohn scours many sources - folk stories, recordings, research - for relevant grammar and vocabulary. Root words - verbs like “to see” and nouns like “water” - are transformed with suffixes and prefixes added to show action, possession, location or intent, creating an impressive variety of vocabulary words to unpack. Eventually they’ll create conversations and analyze stories, but they start with the basics: the 42-character alphabet and the root words that are Southern Lushootseed’s backbone.Įvery word in Southern Lushootseed, whether spoken or written, is packed with information. That journey progresses twice a week in a small classroom, where Hohn’s 15 beginner students eagerly set out notebooks and dictionaries on L-shaped desks. If they don’t know what the sentence is saying, they know how to figure it out.” “My goal for these students is that they become lifelong learners,” Hohn says. Hohn’s first-year course is designed to give students the tools to decode the language - and use those skills to follow the trail, wherever it may lead. Resources in Southern Lushootseed - from oral recordings to anthropological field notes to folk tales - are spread throughout the region, requiring students of the language to become linguistic detectives. “It took a long time for me to piece that together, and because of those struggles, that’s my priority in teaching.” “I spent a lot of years just building my knowledge of the grammar,” says Hohn. A summer workshop with a respected elder and first-language speaker sparked Hohn’s quest to learn the language embedded in her DNA - and share what she learned with her students. It was at the Puyallup tribe’s Chief Leschi School that Hohn first formally encountered Southern Lushootseed, as a culture teacher in 1993. “The magnitude of work in the past has made our work today that much better and more effective,” says Hohn, adding that the documents and recordings from first-language speakers are invaluable to today’s learners.īuilding on that work, the Puyallup, Muckleshoot and Tulalip tribal schools have infused Lushootseed into the daily curriculum. Hilbert taught Northern Lushootseed at the UW for many years until her retirement in 1988. Many Lushootseed resources wouldn’t exist today without the work of Upper Skagit Tribe member Vi Hilbert and UW linguist Thomas Hess, who collaborated over four decades to document, preserve and standardize Lushootseed as a modern language. In the 1960s, a small group of scholars and community members started interviewing and recording first-language speakers. Centuries of genocide, disease and forced assimilation policies took their toll on the numbers of first-language speakers. Lushootseed, which has distinct Southern and Northern dialects, was once spoken widely by the Coast Salish peoples, from the Skagit Valley to the inlets of the southern Puget Sound. ![]() “If I can teach people how to find it and use it, it will spread everywhere.” “There’s a language held in this University,” says Hohn, a UW lecturer and Puyallup tribal member who has dedicated much of her life to sharing the language. Southern Lushootseed permeates the land around the University of Washington, from the texts and archives held at campus libraries to the names of geographical features like the Duwamish River and the Kitsap Peninsula. ![]() The full-year course, which is on its way to becoming a permanent part of the curriculum, gives students the ability to excavate the language from the writings, recordings, cultural practices and land where it’s been preserved. ![]() In 2019, thanks to Hohn’s work and the Department of American Indian Studies, Southern Lushootseed officially joined the more than 60 world languages already taught at the UW. ![]() Guided by Hohn, students learn to follow a trail of linguistic clues to unlock the indigenous language of the Puget Sound. The sounds and stories preserved in those recordings are connecting across time with a new generation of speakers at the University. Punctuated by cracks and hisses, the aging audio brings to life the words of first-language speakers captured decades ago - when there were many more of them. Voices from the past filter into Tami Hohn’s classroom as her students listen to oral recordings in Southern Lushootseed.
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