Native American Languages Reborn for the Movies

In the new movie "The New World," they had the usual people around: actors, a director, people in charge of lighting, make-up, sound, and costume. But they also had linguists and anthropologists (what?) helping to make the movie more real by helping some of the actors use some real words that Native Americans of that time and place would have spoken.

What are linguists and anthropologists?

Well, a linguist is a scientist who studies languages – the way they grow, change, and even become, like species of animals, extinct.

An anthropologist is a scientist who studies human civilizations – how they grow, change, and, also like species of animals, go into a sort of extinction.

At least half of the world's 6,000 current languages are spoken by so few people that they are likely to go extinct, and many of the remaining 3,000 are disappearing fast.

Many Native American languages died out during the European colonization of North America. No one has spoken Virginia Algonquian, for example, since about 1785.

In "The New World," producers used some words from a vocabulary called proto-Algonquian, which has been put together by linguists and anthropologists from more than 25 languages that were once spoken by Native American people all over the eastern half of what is now the United States.

The Jamestown Colony had a secretary, William Strachey, who tried hard to record the language of the Native Americans that colony encountered. The English word, pecan, for example, was recorded as paukaun by Strachey, while the Virginia Algonquian speakers, it is now believed, would have had a somewhat harder sounding pronunciation that could have been spelled pakán. Proto-Algonquian renders the word pakani, drawing influences from other, non-Virginia Algonquian languages.

For more about efforts anthropologists are making to learn about the Native Americans of the time and place featured in the movie "The New World," see https://outage.wm.edu/site/mweb.html.

For more on the Jamestown settlement, check out https://www.historyisfun.org/.

Education World®
Copyright © 2006 Education World