Youth Culture, Language Endangerment and Linguistic Survivance

by Leisy Thornton Wyman

Overview

Youth Culture and Linguistic Survivance documents a decade of life and language use in a remote Alaskan Yup'ik community. It illuminates how schooling and migration shape complex linguistic ecologies; how youth broker sociolinguistic transformation; and how Indigenous peoples? wide-ranging forms of linguistic survivance sustain unique lifeways in an interconnected world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847697394
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	05/15/2012
Series:	Bilingual Education & Bilingualism Series , #85
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Leisy T. Wyman has worked for over 20 years with Yup'ik communities in Alaska, and is an associate professor in the Language, Reading and Culture (LRC) program at the University of Arizona. Her scholarly works include a theme issue on Indigenous Youth and Bilingualism for the Journal of Language, Identity and Education (McCarty & Wyman, 2009), a forthcoming book on North American Indigenous youth language (Wyman et al, in progress), and a volume of Yup'ik elders? narratives, (Fredson et al., 1998). Her research appears in multiple edited volumes, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of American Indian Education, and World Studies in Education.

Read an Excerpt

Youth Culture, Language Endangerment and Linguistic Survivance

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By Leisy Thornton Wyman

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Leisy Thornton Wyman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-740-0

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CHAPTER 1

Researching Indigenous Youth Language

Most researchers who set out to study language shift in-depth have arrived once language shift has already taken place, or, alternately, once all young people under a certain age no longer use a heritage language productively (for important exceptions, see Luykx, 2003; McCarty et al., 2009; Gal, 1979; Zentella, 1997). This longitudinal study, in contrast, grew out of a teacher-researcher effort to connect youth to local knowledge in a village that happened to be on the cusp of a rapid language shift. My relationship with the community of Piniq started when I took a job as a secondary teacher there in 1992. Like many well-meaning teachers working with students from diverse backgrounds, I had deep questions about how to connect school learning with students' lives. As with many non-Indigenous teachers working in Indigenous contexts, I also had deep questions about how to overcome historical school policies that had erased and oppressed local community practices. I came to Piniq fresh out of the Teach for Alaska teacher education program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1993), where program directors strongly recommended that we 'get to know' our students so that we might counteract longstanding dynamics of distrust between schools and Alaska Native villages (Wyman & Kashatok, 2008). As teachers-in-training, my colleagues and I were also encouraged to join community activities in order to develop relationships with community members, and learn how to connect our classrooms to what others at the time called community funds of knowledge – 'historically accumulated and culturally developed knowledge and bodies of knowledge and skills' (Moll, 1992: 133).

Getting to Know the 'Real Speakers'

As a high school teacher in a small school from 1992 to 1995, I taught a seven-year span of students (n. 75), many of whom I had the privilege of teaching for three years in a row. Among these students were the tail end of the group that community members later identified as the 'the last ones who really spoke Yup'ik', the RS group. I also taught a three-year span of younger students who were on the cusp of language shift. As one of three secondary teachers, I generally taught each group of students for two hours a day, and ran study halls after school.

Part of a village teacher's job was also to run after school activities and to travel by plane for extracurricular overnight trips to other villages and the hub town of Bethel. The school district funded extensive student travel at the time, and district policy required a certified teacher to accompany students. As the only new, single, young certified teacher in Piniq, I was by far the most willing to take on chaperoning duties. Perhaps in response to my own enthusiasm for spending extra time with students, or more likely due to the small selection of teachers to choose from, I became the chaperone of choice and accompanied RS youth on almost every overnight sports trip during my first year teaching.

From 1992 to 1995, I continued to chaperone sports trips, and organized a third of the students in the RS group to participate in academic competitions in Bethel. I also spent time with the combined junior/senior class – who later came to be identified as the 'very last group to speak Yup'ik to one another' – as an advisor organizing fundraisers, a trip to the Alaska Federation of Natives meeting in Anchorage, a senior trip around Alaska and a trip for students to study state government in Juneau. When traveling with students, inclement weather often prevented our return to the village for up to five days. As a result, such trips provided extended opportunities for observing students interacting with one another and with students from other villages. Given various extracurricular activities, I spent over one thousand hours with the RS group out of class over the course of three years. I also observed or worked with all but six students in the RS group in at least one extra-curricular activity. In Piniq, I further got to know many of my students' parents, and saw students in situations ranging from relaxing at home, attending local feasts, to traveling by snowmobile to church events in neighboring villages.

Every week from 1992 to 1995, I spent at least two hours writing up my experiences and observations, tracking my progress as I tried to 'get to know' my students and tailor my educational efforts. After joining the Alaska Teacher Researcher Network in 1993, I approached my work as a teacher-researcher. The bulk of my classes were English and English Language Development; since some villagers were already voicing concerns about language shift, many of my notes from this time concerned students' language use, comments about language learning, English, Yup'ik and bilingualism, and the ways local metamessages about language seemed to reflect or contradict local practices and beliefs about socialization. In weekly reflections, I also documented my own struggles as a white teacher to counteract historical and racialized dynamics of distrust between the school and the local community.

My teacher-research centered on finding ways to make connections between my classroom and the community of Piniq. As part of this research, as described briefly in Chapter 4, I worked with students, Yup'ik teachers, traditional council members and other community members on a project in which youth interviewed local elders, transcribed and translated resulting interviews, and used locally gathered information to complete academic work in English, Yup'ik and an Alaska Native history course. Through this collaboration, I was able to foster respectful relationships with students and community members, building on young people's strengths and interests in the classroom, and deepening my understanding of language, culture and education.

The intergenerational work raised deep questions, however, about how local language practices were situated socially, historically and politically, and what this meant for the schooling of youth in a setting of language endangerment. Community concerns and my own questions led me to graduate studies; from 1995 to 2000, I studied education, linguistics and anthropology at Stanford University, returning semiannually to continue collaborative work documenting elders' narratives and once to be a graduation speaker. On these trips, I noted what had happened to my students, caught up with as many youth and families as possible, and visited with community members in Piniq. I also talked with veteran local educators and a rotating cast of nonlocal teachers and administrators about their observations of ongoing educational changes and language shift.

Early in my studies, I noted how commonly language shift studies seemed to portray community members as mere linguistic victims of larger power dynamics. At that time in my scholarly writing I started using the pseudonym 'Piniq', a locally recognizable word made from the Yup'ik cognate pini- or 'strength' and the hybrid word ending -(a)q, as an everyday reminder not to lose sight of the tremendous cultural, human and linguistic strengths I had seen in the Yup'ik youth and adults I knew.

The Uneven Puzzle of Early Language Shift

In the summer of 2000, I returned to Piniq for 14 months of research on young people's bilingualism. Upon reentering local life, I first confronted a puzzle: while I had lived away from the village for only five years, community members reported that a language tip, or rapid language shift (Dorian, 1989), had taken place among the youth. Community members referred to young people as 'those English-speaking kids' and claimed 'kids these days speak only English'. Schoolteachers and a new local administrator noted that young children were coming to school speaking mostly English, and assumed that parents must not be speaking Yup'ik to children at home.

To hear some community members and educators talk, one would get the impression that no young people could speak or were speaking Yup'ik, and that families were simply choosing to use English. Yet, as I walked around and visited families with adolescent and pre-adolescent children, I saw many young people using Yup'ik at home with parents, and subgroups of youth using Yup'ik with one another. In most of the young families I knew, the oldest siblings spoke Yup'ik, yet the youngest siblings spoke English. Within a considerable percentage of families, however, even preschool-aged children spoke Yup'ik comfortably.

As I came back to live in Piniq, in some ways I stepped back into my previous community roles. I volunteered in school, sang in the local church and resumed rounds of visiting and taking steam baths with friends. This time, however, I returned with a husband and a young child. I also lived in village housing without running water, rather than in teacher housing. As a result, I was much more aware of family joys and responsibilities, and immersed in the daily work of life in rural Alaska. I was also much more available to participate in community life and to work on my own Yup'ik skills.

During the 14 months of research, I filled in previous blind spots by paying attention to the lives of parents and children in Piniq, and participated in the yearly cycle of events, including holiday celebrations and women's subsistence activities, ranging from egg hunting to skinning a seal. Helping my husband learn to fit in locally as a man, caregiver and novice hunter, as well as integrating our son into community life, provided additional dimensions to the research, forcing me to consider local gender roles as well as expectations surrounding childrearing. Interviews and many more conversations with elders, parents, educators and school district personnel further helped me consider how bilingualism in Piniq was inherently part of continuing struggles to maintain a Yup'ik way of life, and local responses to wide-ranging historical changes.

Identifying Cornerstone Peer Groups

Identifying the last generation, let alone the last peer group, to actively use a heritage language and the first group to use mostly a nonheritage language is a challenging task when language tip is in progress. At the time of the research, however, Piniq was a small community with multistranded relationships. People in Piniq were related to one another as family members and coparticipants within overlapping networks and communities of practice: as classmates, educators, neighbors, basketball teams, search and rescue teams, as coworkers and coboard members in the school or council and as comembers of church, singing, hunting and fishing groups. According to Yup'ik cosmology, people were also spiritually connected through naming relationships, enacted through gift-giving, comments and special attention to one's relatives in name (e.g. Fienup-Riordan, 2000).

Thus, people in Piniq knew one another and knew about one another. They knew one another's children and about the personal histories of families and individuals. People paid attention to one another when they met neighbors and kin on the boardwalk, at church, out on the tundra or ocean, at the local store, in steam houses, at the health clinic and while visiting Bethel or other villages. People saw one another interact within and across multiple contexts again and again, and had a deep knowledge of one another's life circumstances and language use.

Community members were quick to identify which youth were the last to use primarily Yup'ik with one another. Veteran Yup'ik educators who had worked with students throughout their school years also shared a wealth of information concerning the academic trajectories, language skills and circumstances of individuals and groups of youth. Since local families had up to 10 children, a number of parents had children spanning the decade that marked a language shift in local youth culture. Talking to these and other parents about their childrens' language use further confirmed the observations of educators and community members about the dramatic changes taking place between the RS and GB group.

District Yup'ik Proficiency Test scores based on structured Yup'ik interviews in 1998 showed a remaining basic level of Yup'ik language proficiency in the years immediately following the RS group, but also confirmed community impressions that Piniq was in an early stage of language shift, as we see in Table 1.1. The scores in Table 1.1 also suggested that young people's Yup'ik skills were highly uneven in early language shift, as later research subsequently confirmed.

Last but not least, in order to establish an emic view of the tip to English within local youth culture, I used observations of the youth themselves. Throughout the study, young people in Piniq were confronted regularly with ways they did or did not measure up to adult expectations for language use. Like bilinguals in general, they were at times hard pressed to articulate details of their daily language practices. Nevertheless, youth in Piniq grew up with an overall sense of who was and was not 'really speaking Yup'ik' according to community expectations. Community members, Yup'ik educators, parents and youth all identified the RS group, born in the late 1970s, as the last youth to use mostly Yup'ik with one another.

Building the Comparative Study

One of the challenges of language shift research is to tease apart complex, rapidly changing situations to determine the sources of linguistic change. Compared within are the language socialization trajectories and peer dynamics of two consecutive cohorts of youth: (1) the 'Real Speaker', or RS group and (2) the younger liminal group with very uneven Yup'ik skills often described by community members as just able to 'Get By' in Yup'ik, GB hereafter. Comparing the RS and GB groups illuminated how contingencies, societal changes and evolving language ideologies concerning the purpose and possibilities of bilingualism, as well as Yup'ik language ability and learnability, became significant and had increasing impact over time, influencing the tip into English in local youth culture.

On my return, I had the privilege of following up with my former students, hearing the joys and challenges they faced as young adults living in Piniq, flowing between village and urban life, or back and forth to their spouses' villages. In 2000–2001, I observed and interviewed many former students who stayed in Piniq as young adults, and found out what had happened to youth who had left. Interviews with parents and teachers of the RS group further helped me supplement my notes and observations of the RS group during the 1990s, and notes from follow-up visits in the following years.

During 2000–2001, I also conducted 11 taped semistructured interviews and 12 conversational interviews (reconstructed in notes the same day) with RS youth. These interviews focused on RS group members' reflections on their childhoods, experiences as secondary level youth and experiences with language and life after high school. RS interviewees included individuals who reflected the general level of bilingualism in the group, as well as outliers who leaned more heavily toward English or Yup'ik use. The RS interviewees also represented varying life paths after high school, including youth who had left and stayed in Piniq, and those who had flowed among post-secondary programs, training opportunities and jobs in urban hub towns and cities. Importantly, the group also included a number of young parents.

Getting to Know the 'Get By' Group

During fieldwork in 2000–2001, I faced the challenge of 'getting to know' the younger GB group. Many GB youth remembered me vaguely as someone they had seen singing Yup'ik in church or in a short-lived village rock band, and/or someone who taught their older brothers and sisters. To focus on GB peer culture I volunteered daily in the local seventh grade classroom. School assessments showed that the class had particularly mixed Yup'ik skills. The local Yup'ik teacher in charge of the class used Yup'ik extensively in the classroom to focus students on learning tasks, praise and sometimes scold students, and explain topics in Yup'ik or a mixture of Yup'ik and English. Participating regularly in the classroom helped me identify patterns in bilingual talk directed at GB youth, and to observe some of the ways in which youth used language to get by with adult Yup'ik speakers.

Within the undercurrents of classrooms, hallways and school-related activities, students use language to work out identities that might not receive approval from adults, given discourses of schooling, and/or discourses about students' heritages (Blackledge & Creese, 2008; Canagarajah, 1997). Students' peer-directed casual talk, everyday interactions and even seemingly off-task humming and singing in school can highlight young people's linguistic creativity and sophistication, social use of language and multilayered worlds (Moses & Wigglesworth, 2008; Rampton, 2006). Students also use private asides, comments, jokes, stories, word play, teasing and insults to construct stances that are complex, creative and sometimes pedagogically oppositional (Canagarajah, 2004; Gutiérrez et al., 1995).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Youth Culture, Language Endangerment and Linguistic Survivance by Leisy Thornton Wyman. Copyright © 2012 Leisy Thornton Wyman. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Researching Indigenous Youth Language
Chapter 2: Elders and Qanruyutait in Village Life
Chapter 3: Educators, Schooling and Language Shift
Chapter 4: The “Last Real Yup’ik Speakers”
Chapter 5: Family Language Socialization in a Shifting Context
Chapter 6: The “Get By Group”
Chapter 7: Subsistence, Gender and Storytelling in a Changing Linguistic Ecology
Conclusion
Epilogue: Educational Policies and Yup’ik Linguistic Ecologies a Decade Later

Editorial Reviews

Based on two decades of work with the Alaska Native village of “Piniq,” Leisy Wyman's masterful ethnography reveals the complex ways in which youth peer culture and family language policies intersect with those of the school, how youth “talk back” to pressures of language shift, and the far-reaching impacts of tacit and official policies on a community's linguistic future....A beautifully written sociolinguistic portrait of one community's fight for linguistic, cultural, and educational self-determination, and a “must read” for language scholars and practitioners alike.

Teresa L. McCarty

With great sensitivity and insight Leisy Wyman takes us on a journey to the inner recesses of an indigenous language and culture struggling to maintain a way of life that is undergoing rapid cross-generational transformation and linguistic upheaval. Drawing on both an insider and outsider perspective, Wyman provides detailed documentation of family, community, institutional and societal influences on Yup'ik youth as they navigate the shifting linguistic ecologies impacting their homeland.

Ray Barnhardt

This book is essential reading for those concerned about endangered languages. Wyman complicates and problematizes our existing understanding of heritage language maintenance by examining ways in which youth develop strategies of languaging and translanguaging for linguistic “survivance.” It is an invaluable resource for students of bilingualism, for concerned educators, and for members of minority communities around the world.

Guadalupe Valdés

Youth Culture, Language Endangerment and Linguistic Survivance offers a broad, comprehensive, and thought-provoking overview of language shift, youth culture, and indigenous youths' efforts for linguistic survivance in and out of school. This book is an invaluable resource for language scholars, practitioners, and students who are concerned about bilingualism and language endangerment. Readers will be able to go beyond bilingualism and better understand the challenges indigenous youth, parents, and local schools are facing today.

Yongsu Park

Wyman provides a wealth of information about the challenges indigenous people face today, and doe an excellent job of documenting how quickly rapid language shift and problematic cultural changes can take place.

Jon Reyhner

Wyman analyzes youth culture amid rapid language shift and delineates ways that resources for heritage language development are grouped, preserved, and eroded. She examines how these varying and unpredictable groupings drive linguistic change... centraliz[ing] youth as active agents and refut[ing] commonplace assumptions about language shift—including the role of globalized youth culture, the ascription of low status, and the absence of allegiance. [Wyman] illustrates, in concrete detail, the concepts building throughout the book, teasing out the ricocheting, variable, seemingly small factors fueling language tip. The presentation of the families' dilemmas and responses is vivid and cogent... Throughout the study, Wyman cites a range of research to situate, counter, or support ideas and policies about language use in Piniq. Her work is original, clear, and carefully organized. Wyman's study will be invaluable for future researchers investigating schooling and shift... It will be of interest to educational policymakers and advocates, education scholars, and teacher preparation programs. Scholars, researchers, and policymakers studying land-use and language will benefit as well. The book is also a resource for students of ethnography investigating the structure and organization of multilayered studies. ... Wyman beautifully demonstrates that efforts to understand cultural change must attend to intricacy and be mindful of the pitfalls of the ready-made idea.

Sarah L. “How Do You Translate 'Discipline Richardson

Wyman analyzes youth culture amid rapid language shift and delineates ways that resources for heritage language development are grouped, preserved, and eroded. She examines how these varying and unpredictable groupings drive linguistic change… centraliz[ing] youth as active agents and refut[ing] commonplace assumptions about language shift—including the role of globalized youth culture, the ascription of low status, and the absence of allegiance. [Wyman] illustrates, in concrete detail, the concepts building throughout the book, teasing out the ricocheting, variable, seemingly small factors fueling language tip. The presentation of the families’ dilemmas and responses is vivid and cogent… Throughout the study, Wyman cites a range of research to situate, counter, or support ideas and policies about language use in Piniq. Her work is original, clear, and carefully organized. Wyman's study will be invaluable for future researchers investigating schooling and shift… It will be of interest to educational policymakers and advocates, education scholars, and teacher preparation programs. Scholars, researchers, and policymakers studying land-use and language will benefit as well. The book is also a resource for students of ethnography investigating the structure and organization of multilayered studies. … Wyman beautifully demonstrates that efforts to understand cultural change must attend to intricacy and be mindful of the pitfalls of the ready-made idea.

Sarah L. “How Do You Translate ‘Disc Richardson