Back in the 1950s when I was a boy growing up in Georgetown, Tx, I was conscious of many languages being spoken as I walked around the downtown area: English, Spanish, German, Swedish, even Czech. There was still a substantial coterie of people growing up on the farms to the north and east who never spoke English at home, though their families had been local for generations. And when they spoke English in town, it was often in a halting singsong accent with Swedish or German grammar and word order. ("I trowed de horse over de fence some hay.") That experience was rapidly disappearing by the middle 1960s. Now, of course, only Spanish and English have survived as something commonly heard. I think Spanish would disappear as well if the supply of native speakers weren't constantly being renewed. I blame TV, which became commonplace during the fifties and quickly replaced almost all other forms of entertainment.

Welsh, Irish and Maori are great examples of languages that have increased their usage and numbers of first speakers.

My stepson is Cherokee on his mother's side and she is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He like my children and grandchildren are enrolled in the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma. My late father in-law was instrumental in recording the Sauk language because he was one of the few people to be a fluent speaker. My late mother in-law was a member of the Muscogee Creek tribe of Oklahoma. I am enrolled in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota. There is a member of my tribe, Ray Taken Alive who is revitalizing and reclaiming the Lakota language (Siouan) within the reservations from the Lakota Language Consortium. The LLC is run by two European people who went in and recorded several Lakota elders and then gave them no credit and monetized the language and tried to force Lakota people to pay them to relearn their own language. The LLC had the elders sign a contract that they would never teach the language again to their own community members. They have consistently tried to smear anyone who questions their methods. Slowly thanks to Ray Taken Alive, the various tribal councils of Standing Rock and other tribal councils on Rosebud are banning the LLC from trying to dominate any other Lakota people teaching their own language. Since the LLC is headed by Europeans, they don't understand the cultural context of much of the language because they are not Lakota and don't live and have not grown up around Lakota people. This has resulted in the version of Lakota that they teach being not understandable by fluent Lakota speakers. Tribal languages have different dialects and different cultural meanings that can't be taught or understood without having a connection to the community. It's very important for anyone teaching and taking language classes to live and learn within the respective communities instead of online.

For those wondering about the etymology of sequoia trees this what Wikipedia has: The etymology of the genus name has been presumed-initially in The Yosemite Book by Josiah Whitney in 1868[8]-to be in honor of Sequoyah (1767-1843), who was the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary.[9] An etymological study published in 2012 concluded that Austrian Stephen L. Endlicher is actually responsible for the name. A linguist and botanist, Endlicher corresponded with experts in the Cherokee language including Sequoyah, whom he admired. He also realized that coincidentally the genus could be described in Latin as sequi (meaning to follow) because the number of seeds per cone in the newly classified genus aligned in mathematical sequence with the other four genera in the suborder. Endlicher thus coined the name "Sequoia" as both a description of the tree's genus and an honor to the indigenous man he admired.

Would be great if these native American languages could really be taught in school! Greetings from Bavaria!

Jackson is right about the horses of Chincoteague and Assateague having origins with the Spanish; a recent DNA test seems to make the Spanish shipwreck legend of their origin very plausible. Other horses like South Carolina Marsh Tacky and North Carolina Banker also have their origins from wild horses originating from the Spanish. This was fascinating! I am embarrassingly ignorant about Native languages within the US and it was an enlightening and quite a joy to learn a bit.

In the UK the Welsh language was suppressed starting around the mid 1530s, until fairly recently. I think it's starting to recover and bounce back. On holidays about 20 to 30 years ago, I heard it spoken in many shops, cafe's and pubs. A cousin of mine married a lovely Welsh girl some time ago, and most if not all her family are Welsh speakers.

Omg I’ve loved studying the Cherokee language!

Osiyo! so awesome to see this! greetings from California cherokee diaspora

I realized why I admire these interviews so much. I thought it was because of the great intellect behind the questions and though that is true, I love it so much because the questions lead the conversation in a way I did not expect, so I end up so much better off going down a rabbit hole I did not even foresee. Uh, to clarify...one cannot ask great questions until they first understand enough to do so.

OMG, Ben!!! He was my TA for one of my German classes. I'm so hyped to watch this video now. Great to see him doing well!

Thanks for having him on. Would be cool if he started a YT channel and put out a few Cherokee basics learning videos.

Jackson, I saw you out and about in Reykjavik today I think. My friend really wanted to say thank you, but didn’t want to bother you. So thanks for the great videos!

I resorted to the Rosetta Stone language program that taught basics of my Tribal tongue. I am a "card carrying member" of the Chickasaw Nation.

My sister taught herself the Cherokee Syllabary back in elementary school. She learned a few words too but mostly just used the syllabary to English sentences she wanted to keep private, like her diary.

Jackson needs to own the Star Wars thing and put it on his website.

Ben should make a Cherokee course as part of Glossika's Viva program! That would be a powerful tool for learners

My father was irish and i've attempted to learn the language several times but to no avail. Here in England we now have a tv channel in welsh and another in Scots Gallic

walking around Hasidic Willliamsburg, I sure feel isolated and sense a barrier.

This is the video that finally got me to sign up on Patreon. I would have loved to have been able to submit a comment or question to this one when it was live.

Great video, thanks for posting this!

Thank you so much for sharing this conversation.

Always delivering 🤘

Thx to you both - really enjoyed this

I am the first of my dad’s family born outside of Western NC (Sylva, Dillsboro, Andrews, Alexander, Cherokee). Before my Dad died, he asked that I visit Cherokee and the surrounding area (I am descended from Ensleys, Suttons, Dills, Quintons, Childers, Wilds, Cassadas (Austrians), Harrisons (Colonial VA), and I recently found out Kruse/Cruze/Cuzzine/Cousins(various spellings) from (amazingly) Kopparberg, Sweden!! I have been doing some family research since Dad has died. In some ways, I think it was his parting “gift” to me - so I would not be “alone,”without family. The Swedish connection is how I found this channel. I have begun analyzing my Swedish ancestors. Supposedly these Swedes immigrated to Rutherford Co. NC sometime around 1700. Maybe departing after the fall of Fort Christina in Delaware? (this I learned about from Pewdiepie on KZfaq, of all people!!). I cannot imagine what the journey was like and the strangeness of all the cultures that melded into that Western NC region - with the Cherokee/Aniyunwiya. From what I have learned, it was a very diverse region with many languages and dialects. When my grandmother died in 1996 (at 104) she was still able to speak Scots-Gaelic with a woman from Scotland (who was visiting in her retirement neighborhood in Virginia). My family has lost most of these languages. In fact, I was angry that I had not been told that my grandmother spoke Gaelic - only to find out that it was something to be “ashamed” of in her generation. I think this is also true for those of us with mixed-Cherokee heritage. Some in the past may have been ashamed of being Cherokee. And there probably is/was some shame associated with being “disconnected” from the language and culture, being afraid of being accused of “appropriating” culture/language - and this may hold us back from creating a broader group of Cherokee speakers. I am still diving into the history of the region, and I am beginning to get a feel for the politics and divisions that occurred before, during, and after the Indian Removal of 1838 - it seemed to “cleve” the community apart. We owe a huge debt to those in the EBCI, UKB, and Cherokee Nation today that are trying to retain and grow the language and culture.

The historical Cherokee lands primarily in modern day NC, TN, GA weren't as far as you might think from the Great Lakes region and current day NY. The Warriors Path linked both regions and speakers of the northern and southern branches came in contact regularly as a result. If the 4k estimate did not take into account continued regular contact, it may well have underestimated the separation.

Thanks!

I have not yet finished the video (although I will). For virtual conversation, setting up a Discord server might be a modern, accessible, and culturally relevant area to facilitate that. My great-grandfather was the son of a Cherokee and Choctaw couple that escaped from the Trail, and I was already thinking about potentially getting more into my Cherokee heritage the last few days already.

okie here. i am happy to say that there are cherokee language efforts here as well

Taken from a story of how Ridley Scott used ancient languages in PROMETHEUS..."what did it sound like to hear the ur-language from which this confusion of tongues derived? In 1868, just before he died, German linguist August Schleicher made his best guess, writing out a short story in Proto-Indo-European as best he could reconstruct it. The tale has become known as Schleicher’s Fable, and has been updated by centuries of subsequent linguists as knowledge of Proto-Indo-European has grown. It probably achieved its widest-ever audience when it was featured as homework for robots in Ridley Scott’s 2012 movie Prometheus " There is audio of attempts to speak this from the movie..but... I had no way to embed the audio into a comment...😔

Love the shoutout to Birmingham

I was disappointed that he didn't mention anything about what's going on in Cherokee, NC itself to preserve the language. The high school teaches it, I graduated from WCU which has grown tremendously in its coursework in Cherokee culture and language and there's also a whole online setup for learning the language... not to mention that all along the Appalachian Mtn range, particularly in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia it's so blended into the mountain culture itself that it can be hard to distinguish but it's still very much there

What’s the status of the Wampanoag language? There is some revitalization l, but so really wish there were KZfaq videos teaching the world how to speak the Native languages.

Apparently Stephan Endlicher, who named the tree species but in addition to being a botanist was a published linguist, so the theory is that he did name it out of respect for Sequoyah. There is some theory that it is from Latin for something about sequence, but there is no evidence he was aware of that at the time. He may have also not known how to pronounce Sequoyah, as he was Austro-Hungarian and probably never heard Cherokee? Oh, also on the topic of being known for what your neighbours called you, I know that's the case for a bunch of Native Americans here in Canada. Iroqois apparently might come from the the French trying to say the Algonquin name for them, rattlesnake. Many tribes call themselves something like "the people". Also also, the Navajo language is in the Athabaskan family, which is weird, because the rest of the Athabaskans are in like NWern Canada, Alaska, just incredibly far away.

Makes me want to listen to the song "Cherokee" by Europe.

Links for Native American language app? Please... And thank you all(including Stella).

For mainstream languages, there's some awesome emerging schools, I wonder if those emerging schools market in the same capacity as those, would affect the revitalization 🤔

Interesting how you end the letter with the greeting in Cherokee...

Regarding Jackson’s question about a native Cherokee literary canon, I can only speak secondhand. In college I had a class on the Indians of the southeastern US by a middle aged woman who had returned for her doctorate I think. At any rate she and her husband lived near the North Carolina Cherokee, and one day in class she brought in some masks which she said would traditionally be used in not really plays per se but sort of mummer’s performances maybe with the mask being a person or stereotyped group that had a recognizable character. I take it some or all of these were risqué as the mask for a white man was distinguished by a comically long nose representing shall we say another part of his body, and his character was to mostly make unending advances towards women in the audience. At any rate maybe she made The whole thing up, but if not I would not be surprised if some or all of these characters may have had some more or less standard dialogue along with things made up in the moment. It could be more wishful thinking than anything, but I’ve put a lot of thought recently into stuff like this, puppet theater, professional wrestling and similar sort of semi-literary performance art that isn’t recorded much.

If you can get some of the language learning apps to pick up more obscure languages you may get more people interested.

Dr. Frey, I was under the impression that you can take Cherokee language at Western Carolina University...is this incorrect? I would wonder what learning materials they would use?

My great great grandmother was East band Cherokee I've always wanted to reconnect with the culture but I feel out of place doing so

I'd kill to speak with the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Foundation 😁

Find Sam Hiders language tapes now on CD ... he was a Native 1st language speaker AND insisted it not be short cut .... Eastern Syllabary and Western have one more one less character .... I learned to speak with some Native Speakers in North Georgia as a young man .... Ani Yun WI Ya

On the name of the tree genus whether it was named for Sequoyah is still undecided and argued over. Some follow a late 19th century argument that it actually derives from the Latin _sequor_, to sequence, whereas others insist that it's a latinized version of the name, I'm not certain but think the latter is more likely.

By contrast with the Native Americans, who don't use a lot of greeting formulae, the East African cultures using Kiswahili have elaborate greeting formulae, which go through 2-3 responses before getting down to business.

Great information! Both my heritages mentioned in this video! Very cool! ✌🏻🤍🌟

🤠💜

Never thought of that: why wouldn't the Iroquoian ppls have walked south along the Appalachians? Like an elevated highway.

🙂

Tsalagi is a beautiful language that should be saved.

Bullying students out of the class and playing favorites should not align with the mission to revitalize the Cherokee language.

Thanks a lot - one sees how important it is that a language is written in today's world. And readable! It has to have a positive use, for young speakers, too. Without the false ideas of the Viking age as a heroic time, I wonder if young men would take an interest at all. But this interest has coupled perfectly with white supremacy and violence as the ruling principle in society. Some young Swedish men in Sweden like to think that they stem from the upper-class Vikings, but it seems we have no such anchestors - we are all mainly descendants from their slaves (trälar) who where the lionpart of the population, and from the many women taken hostage from neighbouring villages, regions, and islands. We speak a language with Norse roots and beyond, but we are a bastard bunch, with no especially noble DNA. And the conquering of the Americas is eternally a dishonor for our kind, us with native Indoeuropean languages!

The Irish immersion school situation is worse than described. It isn't just a dialect problem, but rather more a vicious cycle. There are not sufficient native or native-like speakers interested in teaching Irish (the pay is not particularly good for one), and so most of the teachers end up having only a poor grasp on the language. The students then learn this broken Irish and perpetuate it by speaking it with each other. They then graduate and their immersion school experience is what makes them 'qualified' to go and teach at other immersion schools, again perpetuating this vicious cycle of poor Irish speakers creating more poor Irish speakers. The language spoken in these schools is then more of a pidgin of nominally Irish vocabulary with English phonology and syntax. Native and native-like speakers hear it and cannot even recognize it as Irish because it completely lacks the sounds and patterns of actual Irish. This in turn creates more of a vicious cycle where these immersion school learners isolate themselves from and disdain the actual language community and either out of defensiveness or pure ignorance profess themselves as the better experts, teachers, etc., and go out into the world to further spread this pidgin while the Irish language itself continues to lose ground. Of course not every school or every speaker fits into this narrative, but broadly speaking it accurately characterizes the present immersion school situation in Ireland. All that being said, I still generally think the immersion schools are a net positive because it creates employment opportunities and it does create some number of students who do go on to really learn the language.

I have never yelled at a video like I did this one. The Aniyvwiya (Cherokee) is not Iroquoian! Our language is nowhere similar to them. The whole "we don't know where they came from" is also nonsense since our stories say we came to North America from a series of five islands (now underwater) off the coast of Brazil. Our usage of Tsalagi is evidence of this since it is derived from what the Choctaw called us ("Cave Dwellers") when our ancestors arrived here. The Shawnee and Delaware are our relatives. There were technically 4 dialects (I'm counting Chickamauga as well). The dialect mostly spoke in Qualla Boundary, NC is different from what is spoke in Tallaquah, OK. His own shirt is Western syle for "hello" (Osiyo or "oh-see-yo) while he only mentions the Eastern style for "hello" (Siyo or "she-yo") in passing.