Native American Heritage Month: The Quileute Language
Brett Gallagher July 5 2011 10:00:15 AM
November is Native American Heritage Month in the United States, and to honor this month and celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, we would like to highlight a particular Native American language and culture that has gained some degree of celebrity in recent years due in large part to the Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series -- namely the Quileute Tribe, which is centered in and around La Push, a small, unincorporated community on Washington's Olympic Penninsula.
The first of four books in the series, Twilight, was first published in 2005, and was later followed by an additional three books (New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn), as well as a highly successful film series, starring Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen, a teenage vampire with an aversion to killing humans; Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, a mortal, and Edward's love interest in the story; and Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black, a member of the Quileute Tribe, who is later revealed to be a werewolf. It was the character of Jacob Black that spurred interest in the subject of the Quileute people, as well as their culture, mythology and unique language.
Despite the connection drawn in Twilight between the Quileute people and werewolves, this obviously is not actually the case. However, according to traditional Quileute legends, their people do indeed believe that they are descended from wolves. According to the legend, they believe that 'Dokibatt the Changer,' or 'Transformer,' created their people from wolves. Dokibatt plays a major role in the spiritual beliefs of the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
The Quileute language (also known as 'Quillayute') is highly endangered and currently has only a handful of fluent speakers. In 2007, the Quileute tribal council set up a revitalization project in an effort to boost use of the language among the community, including teaching it at their tribal school in La Push, using text books written by the few remaining tribal elders who are able to speak the language fluently.
Quileute is the last surviving member of the Chimakuan language family, and has no known connection to any other living language. The genetic relationships between the various Native American languages and their larger families how, or even if, they are related are in general poorly understood and, in many cases, are only tentatively marked out. Noted linguist Edward Sapir once proposed the existence of Mosan, a super-family made up of the smaller Chimukan, Salishan, and Wakashan language families (similar to how the Indo-European family is composed of the Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Iranian, and other sub-families), but the evidence has not borne this out. The observed similarities that these three groups share in terms of vocabulary and grammar are now thought to have more to do with borrowing over the years due to their close proximity than with an actual genetic relationship.
The language is notable for being one of a very small number (as few as 10, according to one estimate) that has no nasal sounds in English, these are consonants like m, n, and ng, and sometimes vowels that happen next to m, n, and ng. It also has a fairly small vowel inventory three that can be either short or long (/e/, /a/, and /o/) and one (/æ/) that can only be long (English, by way of contrast, has about 12 vowels). Also, in stark contrast to English, the Quileute language is highly polysynthetic, meaning that words are composed of a root and a series of affixes that cover the concepts that English addresses with tense markers, adjectives, adverbs, clauses, etc. This results in words that, at the more extreme end of things, could take a whole sentence to ex pres s in English, such as 'kitlayakwokwilkwolasstaxasalas', which means "those are the people who think that I am the one who is going to Forks."
Aside from the aforementioned efforts to teach the Quileute language at the tribal school in La Push, the Quileute Nation has created other multimedia materials, such as MP3s and CDs for distribution to Quileute children, as well as on their website for the general public who may be interested in learning more about the language.
Hopefully, with the positive attention gained from the Twilight franchise and renewed interest in the Quileute tribe, more research and additional efforts will be undertaken in the near future to help preserve this unique and fascinating language and culture.
For more information about the Quileute Tribe and language, please check out the following websites:
Quileute Nation - http://www.quileutenation.org/
Quileute Nation on MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/quileutenationevents
Ethnologue - http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=qui
Quileute Language & Quileute Indian Tribe - http://www.native-languages.org/quileute.htm
*material gathered from quileutenation.org, ethnologue.com, and the Max Planck Digital Library?s/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology?s World Atlas of Language Structures site (http://wals.info/).
Written by Will Maris & David Evseeff
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