Reclaiming the language - Wamponoag.

The first group of Native Americans colonized.

Yip, along the the eastern coast of the US.

a reply to: halfoldman
Don't get pissed at my nit-picking on this one, but weren't the Taino people the first native americans to be colonized?
Taino

Meanwhile in the South Africa:

The Nu language.



Well, you know how it goes.
www.news24.com...

The Wampanoag, are still around.

In South Africa Nu is down to one person.

Oh but they spoke Afrikaans.
Another language under extreme threat.

I'm pretty sure the first people to be colonized in the Americas were the pre clovis. Taken over by the clovis and so on till you got "Native Americans". Then the Irish came, then the Norse and then portugese fishermen, then it was the new world. The history of the planet is written by colonizers of the colonizers.
Not trying to be edgy or sound racist. It's a simple fact. Take a listen to Native oral history. They were warring with and enslaving one another well before we got here. Just like the Europeans were doing the same to one another. Too feel bad for one marginalized and beaten culture without pity for the rest just seems odd. Languages like cultures come and go. Think anyone will be shedding tears for the current incarnation of society?




a reply to: butcherguy

Wichita - a dying language.
We used to say things, and gossip about people in Wichita.
Now it's gone.

They used to say things in Witchita:

Can one actually "re-claim", or re-introduce a language that's almost extinct?

With enough effort, I think so.

Just ask the Welsh.

Apologies, got to laugh.

This dude in the "Wichita" clip.

Oh, it's just Aunt Doris.

There she goes, speaking that "funny" language again.

a reply to: butcherguy

Yes true, the Taino, and before them the Guanches were the first victims of Western expansion.

OK, I mean North America.

Also just to clarify, when I wrote "We used to say things in Wichita", I should have put it in quotation marks as a line from the clip I was introducing. I have never spoken any language from across "the pond", at least not in this lifetime or body. Just to specify, although sometimes one is in a mind-space where everything just merges. But I've never been to the American continents, much less spoken their native tongues.

Here another fascinating clip on reclaiming Wampanoag:

Another fascinating thing that occurred to me only now in hindsight, is that my OP clip (which wouldn't show, despite the fact that it's not censored or anything weird - but just click on it and it takes you there on YouTube) is that the Wampanoag version of The Bible written centuries ago is used to clarify parts of the language today.

Possibly not what the first missionaries, converts or colonists intended, but a great testimony to some of the cultural spin-offs of having a Bible in any original written "native" tongue.

And then shortly on the Nu or N/u (inserting the click) language.

While tragic, it should be noted that Afrikaans is not a wholly imposed European language.
It has words of Khoisan languages and Cape Malay, and the first Afrikaans was in fact written in Arabic.
Also in other parts of South Africa, the Khoisan (Bushman and Hottentot languages) were replaced or merged with Bantu languages like Xhosa (the eastern Cape) and Sotho (Lesotho and the interior) which still have millions of speakers today.

So this language shift of the indigenous people wasn't just imposed by "whites" or Afrikaans.
It's a complex story, and the Khoisan languages left their trace on almost all the local languages.
In fact, South African English is more akin to the truly imposed language.

And, while hunter-gatherer lifestyles may seem romantic in retrospect, these were not necessarily comfortable or easy lifestyles, and despite colonialist land dispossession and genocide being factors, sometimes people also left traditional lifestyles by choice, for more comfortable or "better" options.

I recall speaking to a Northern Cape Bushman in the 1980's (he worked at a holiday resort as a handyman), and I asked him why despite this "beautiful lifestyle" shown in television documentaries he didn't stay in the Kalahari Desert, and he said you try living in a grass hut in sub-zero temperatures at night with lions roaming about, and you look all wrinkled at 25. The current narrative isn't the whole story. What is sad though is that the Bushmen in particular were framed as "primitive people" at the time, which is why they never got any development aid or housing, and they could live neither traditionally nor enjoy the benefits of modernization, largely due to misleading anthropologists and documentaries. Nobody ever made it clear, you can keep this aspect of your culture, like language, and still modernize. Yeah, till the late 1980's. So, many felt they had to give up on their entire identities, and they ended up living in squalor, on the margins of society.

Of course this only applies to some Bushmen nations in South Africa, much larger groups remain in especially Namibia and Botswana.

Thanks for the news.

Amazing, I thought.
OK 2017, but looks like much work to be done.

a reply to: butcherguy

No , I think it was the Lenepe in New Amsterdam .

Probably De Soto even in Florida, although disputably that was just an attempt to plunder, rather than settle.
A path of destruction nonetheless, and probably an injection of foreign diseases.
en.wikipedia.org...

OK, apologies, I don't know the first tribe in North America to suffer from European colonialism.
But the Wampanoag were not far removed.

I mean if we include the Inuit amongst the Native Americans, and the indigenous people of Greenland, they certainly met the Vikings.
Although what relationship it was is unknown.
There's no evidence of major wars, just that they sporadically came and went.