Ethnologue, a linguistics encyclopedia (1988), estimates that there are between 6,000 and 10,000 languages in the world today. The exact number is unknown, for many languages, particularly in the Americas, go unreported (and underreported). Language death is a worldwide phenomenon. Since languages function not only to reflect reality but also help create it, language extinction does more than simply rob descendants of their own cultural patrimony and medium of expression. It deprives everyone, including future generations, of a unique worldview and perspective.
    Stages of language death range from endangered to “moribund,” a condition a dying language rarely recovers from, where only a handful of scattered elderly speakers use it and no children learn it. Languages are dying out at twice the rate of endangered mammals and four times the rate of endangered birds. The reasons? Not because of any inherent weaknesses, but largely due to economic and political pressures on minority cultures. One-fourth of all human languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Michael Kraus, director of the Alaska Native Language Centers, predicts that as many as 90 percent of languages will be extinct or moribund by 2100.
     In 1977, there were only 50 older speakers of Yuchi from a population of 1,500 among the Creek Indians in east central Oklahoma; by the time of the Ethnologue survey in 1988, Yuchi was listed as extinct. Unami, the language of the Delaware Indian tribe who taught the Founding Fathers principles of democracy, had fewer than 10 speakers in 1990 from a population of 2,000 in Oklahoma; formerly, the Delaware, or Lenape, were regarded by all Indians in North America as the “Grandfathers.” Remaining Native American languages today are invariably endangered or moribund, the “most imperiled of any on the earth,” according to Rodger Doyle writing in Scientific American (1998).
What is Teehahnahmah?
     Teehahnahmah is an ancient Native American language spoken by fewer than forty individuals in Tennessee and Florida. The language has never been recorded in anthropological literature, much less studied or taught. Thus it is not mentioned in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing (1996). The Teehahnahmah people themselves are small in number, non-federally recognized, obscure and secretive, divided between the Cumberland Mountains and the Everglades.
    Teehahnahmah does not appear to be related to any known language family or macro-stock, such as Siouan or Algonkian. It is thus an isolate, like Yuchi or Natchez, a one-of-a-kind language. Certain Teehahnahmah songs, vocables and sacred formulae are perpetuated in the ceremonies of the Cherokee, Yuchi, Shawnee and other Indians, indicating a pattern of interaction between these tribes and suggesting that Teehahnahmah may have served as a religious language or sort of lingua franca. Teehahnahmah annual migration routes ranged all across the eastern tributaries of the Mississippi, from the Great Lakes to the Altamaha and Gulf Coast.
    In addition to a core vocabulary of approximately 2,000 words, Teehahnahmah is also used and understood as a sign language, one similar to Plains Indian Sign Talk. Its wide range can be seen in the fact that at least one word, kiyugwe, was borrowed by tribes as disparate as the Powhatan in Virginia and Tupi in South America (where the Teehahnahmah people claim to have lived at one time). This word gives us English “cougar.” Words for wooly mammoth and other extinct megafauna prove Teehahnahmah’s antiquity.
    One obstacle to linguistic preservation is traditional tribes’ reluctance to share their language or see it written down. For instance, among Ute groups in the American West, “there was a lot of resistance to writing…there still is,” according to William L. Leap, professor of anthropology at American University in Washington. An Oglala Sioux elder on the Pine Ridge Reservation says, “Writing is bad, I think, because you have a tendency to lose some of the spirituality when it’s down in black and white” (New York Times, January 8, 1991).
    A field-reported vocabulary would be an obvious first step to preserving Teehahnahmah both for the Teehahnahmah people themselves and future generations of scholars. If the Teehahnahmah language is not captured soon, owing to the small number of speakers, most of them elderly, it is likely to perish without a record, as have an estimated 500 North American languages to date.
    The benefits of language preservation for historical interpretation can be clearly seen in the case of the Beothuk language and the old and mysterious Viking site at L’Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland. If a single person had written down the words Shanawdithit, the last speaker of Beothuk, before she died in 1829, we would know today what kind of Indians first welcomed, then exterminated, this Viking settlement around A.D. 1000. Knowledge of the Beothuk language would shed light on an important chapter in the story of the New World.
    There has been a renaissance of interest and funding relating to Native American languages since 1990. Passage of the Native American Languages Act in 1992 marked a new era in language preservation and tribal language programs.

For more about the Tihanama language go to the file tihanamalang.doc.

Copyright 2001 Donald N. Panther-Yates