Truman Students Learn Their Craft by Preserving a Community’s Language

A Truman linguistics class is doing its part to help preserve a language and prevent a community from losing its culture to history.
 
This semester, students in LING 401, Montagnard Languages, are working with a refugee community located in Greensboro, North Carolina, in an effort to document, preserve and help transmit the native language of the relocated people to younger generations.
 
Montagnards are, collectively, a group of more than 30 indigenous tribes from the Central Highlands of Vietnam. During the war, they sided with and fought alongside the United States against communist forces. As the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, refugee status was offered to many of the Montagnards, and most were settled in Greensboro. Over time, the community grew as their relatives came to join their families.
 
Emily Long Olsen, assistant professor of linguistics, is the instructor of the Montagnard Languages course.
 
“Our project focuses on recordings of folk stories, mythology and narratives about the life they lived in Vietnam,” she said. “These will be made available as a community resource, with English translation, so that the community, especially the generations that were raised in the U.S., have access to records of what life was like for their parents, grandparents and ancestors.”
 
The Montagnard Languages course is the result of a TruScholars Summer Undergraduate Research Program project from 2023. Olsen brainstormed the project with student Emma Wilson, and the pair used part of their stipend to travel to North Carolina. Onsite, they met with community leaders and speakers of several Montagnard languages for preliminary sessions on six different languages spoken by the community. Because the languages are not well documented, resources for the project are scarce, demonstrating both the need to create more and the challenges in place to make that happen.
 
“It’s incredibly important that this documentation and description is happening,” Wilson said. “It will lead to better linguistic support in the Montagnards’ lives. For example, without documentation and description, no one can develop Google Translate for these languages. As we work through these stories, we learn a little bit more of the structure of these languages, which ultimately can lead to big things, both academically and socially, for them.”
 
Since their initial outreach, Olsen developed the Montagnard Languages course, and Wilson is currently contributing as her research assistant. This spring is the first offering of the course, giving students hands-on opportunities working with participants where there is a language barrier, learning how to conduct a language elicitation session, how to follow data-recording protocols, how to use specific software for language documentation, and group project collaboration skills.
 
“My idea of success is for students to gain the knowledge and skills, but also to understand the significance of language as culture, and to have real-life experiences with an endangered language community and all its complexities,” Olsen said.
 
For student Alexandra Thornhill, the course is the ideal training for her career, and she appreciates the altruistic nature of their work.
 
“This research project is an amazing opportunity to get practice doing the type of linguistic work that I want to do in the future,” she said. “For the Montagnard people, I hope this will help to preserve their languages and stories for future generations. I also hope that our linguistic analyses will help current and future teachers of these languages to feel better equipped in teaching the languages.”
 
The four students enrolled in the course are all upper-level linguistics majors. The class meets once per week to discuss their progress, troubleshoot and plan for the next steps. Independently, students have two to three meetings per week with a member of the Montagnard community. Each session with a native speaker requires about three hours of work on the part of the students, which they do collaboratively.
 
For the Truman students, they get the opportunity to learn about the language families of Southeast Asia, including patterns and elements of the morphology and syntax, as well as phonology, or sound patterns. Their work is being done in collaboration with the Montagnard Dega Association, and it will ultimately contribute to transmitting the language to younger generations by helping create a foundation for standardized writing and recording materials.
 
“It’s been amazing to do, and it’s confirmed my interest in continuing this type of work. Not only because language work is fascinating, but also because these people are so happy that someone is showing an interest,” Wilson said.
 
The Montagnard Language course is an independent study offering, and while there are currently no plans for a future formal course, the project is not necessarily ending at the end of the semester. Wilson could pursue additional aspects of it in graduate school, or Truman students could work on it to fulfill their own research interests.