Using technology to resurrect a near-forgotten language

Three people in Chickaloon Village are hoping CD-ROMs will help draw the Ahtna Athabascan language back from the brink of extinction.

Dimi Macheras, Kari Johns and Daniel Harrison, among others, are working to preserve their traditional Athabascan culture, but most importantly, they want to save the Ahtna Athabascan language through the efforts of the Chickaloon Village tribal government.

"It all started back in 1992, when my grandma decided that we needed to preserve our culture, and especially the language," Macheras said. His grandmother is Katherine Wade, a village elder, one of the last of the elders to speak their native tongue fluently and founder of the village's Ya Ne Dah Ah School.

"So she started teaching it and documenting it," Macheras said. "Her and Daniel went through and recorded a bunch of language and wrote down the words and phrases and eventually, we were out of school and we were hired back at the village and that was where Kari and Daniel began documenting it. Grandma wanted to see some CD-ROMs made eventually, and that was her idea."

The Chickaloon Village Education & Cultural Preservation Department, through the Koht'aen Kenaege Project, found grant money to produce CD-ROMs it will use to begin preserving and passing on their native language.

The Chickaloon Village Traditional Council previously conducted a language survey that indicated only 1 percent of its tribal citizens speak the Ahtna Athabascan language fluently, while the rest of the population speaks little or none.

Joshua Fishman, a language-revitalization scholar, proposed a model in which languages are ranked in stages. The Ahtna Athabascan language is rated at stage 8, being closest to total extinction.

The Ahtna Athabascan language was the primary language for indigenous people living between Upper Cook Inlet and the Copper River region.

In 1972, there were 200 fluent Ahtna Athabascan speakers in the region, according to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Alaska Native Language Center. In 1988, there were 100 speakers. In 1994, there were fewer than 80 fluent Ahtna Athabascan speakers, and in 2004, there were fewer than 50 speakers of the language.

Between October 2003 and February 2004, a total of five fluent speakers of the language died, leaving behind descendents who didn't learn and cannot speak the language.

The three cousins are all working toward the same goal of revitalizing the Ahtna Athabascan language, but each seems to have a different job in accomplishing that goal.

Macheras is an artist who has been designing artwork for the CD covers. The illustrations depict scenes of different tales and legends from their cultural past, and the images will help younger children understand their history.

Macheras's cousin, Kari Johns, is heavily involved in the functioning level of the school and one of the main administrators for the program. Their cousin, Daniel Harrison, is a village instructor at the Ya Ne Dah Ah School.

"There were generational gaps in the language," Johns said. "We had some people who were forbidden to speak it and then other pockets of people who were able to speak it, so some people still exist who know it, but they are very few. There are a lot of our people who couldn't learn it, because it had been forgotten by many."

The Ahtna Athabascan alphabet is the written sound system used in the Ahtna Athabascan language. Ahtna has consonants and vowels that have similar pronunciations in English, with a few exceptions.

Learning how the sound system works and identifying the sounds assist in understanding the Ahtna language and further the knowledge in speaking. This is why the CDs will help young students learn the language.

Each CD is interactive, so a student can listen to a word over and over again, giving time for pronunciation practice and memorization.

There are eight different CDs that teach at different levels.

"It is all about our alphabet, but the CDs progress from introduction in the first CD on up to everything else we have recorded, word and phrases, including the sound system used to speak it," Macheras said. "A lot of words mean different things depending on how they are spoken, pronounced, or combined."

The group also employs the assistance of Tom Brannen, a multimedia specialist who has been with them for about eight years. The eight-CD set includes: beginning Ahtna language learning, which incorporates the alphabet, nature, objects, people, place names, conversation and two Ahtna stories, and are recorded in Daniel Harrison's voice.

"They're all really good kids and they all work really hard," said Patricia Wade, Macheras's mother and Katherine Wade's daughter.