Volunteers try to save endangered Mono language

NORTH FORK, Calif. — Just uphill from an authentic cedar tepee, four children sat down for a lesson in a language on the cusp of being lost.

Volunteer teacher Barbara Burrough, one of the few people left who still speaks Mono, held up a cue card with the word "kah-why-you."

"Horse," the youngsters said.

Next was "moo-nah."

"Mule," they said.

Burrough's mother, 81-year-old Gertrude Davis, smiled as she watched the recent lesson unfold.

"I speak it, and I have no one to talk to, because no one knows how to speak the language or understand it," she said.

In classrooms, Mono cultural sites and private homes in the North Fork area, Burrough and a few others are working hard to change that, one child at a time.

Before contact with Spanish and English-speaking cultures in the 1800s, an estimated 5,000 spoke Mono in a territory that stretched from the San Joaquin River south to the Kern River. Today, Burrough estimates that no more than 17 people around North Fork can converse in the native tongue and not all of them are fluent.

North Fork Mono Rancheria Tribal Council treasurer Maryann McGovran's son Cody, 13, has been one of Burrough's pupils for about two years. She said he isn't fluent in Mono, but he knows a few words.

Preserving the language is important, she said at tribal headquarters, because the language reflects the culture.

"It's the heart of our tribe," she said. "It shows who we are and what our people are about."

Mono is among 50 Native American languages in California that are considered endangered, said Leanne Hinton, professor emeritus in the linguistics department at the University of California at Berkeley. Another 50 already have disappeared since the early 1800s, she said.

"When you lose a language, it's a symptom of losing a whole culture," said Hinton, who has written three books devoted to endangered languages.

But saving a language is no easy task, especially when so few people still speak it.

A nearby tribe — the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians near Coarsegold— also is trying to save its language. The Chukchansi are preserving tribal words and songs with state-of-the-art electronic translators inspired by military technology.