The Chickasaw Are Using the Internet to Save Their Native Language

The internet is often blamed for bringing about the conditions that kill regional languages—namely by making more widely spoken alternatives, often English, more profitable, available, and attractive. But it can also give those threatened dialects a lifeline. Just as it has brought together geographically disparate communities of bronies, ASMR enthusiasts, and Weezer obsessives, the internet can also help keep a language—and by extension a culture—alive.

Mary-Ann Russon at the International Business Times outlined how the Chickasaw Native American nation has created a vibrant online community. Beyond “thriving” Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram accounts, the Chickasaw Nation Video Network has six channels and 1,500 videos of oral history, customs, stories, even features on cooking to preserve their 3,000-year-old language by reaching the 15,000 tribe members who connect to the nation online.

The language, "Chikashshanompa," is categorized by UNESCO as "severely endangered." Joshua Hinson, the director of the Chickasaw National Language Department told IBTimes UK that while there were “over 3,000 speakers of Chickasaw in the 1960s,” those numbers have dwindled to just 65 native speakers today, and only four or five confident conversational speakers under the age of 35.

"The last native speakers who learnt the language at home were born in the late 1940s,” Hinson said. “From that point on, with people leaving Oklahoma for other parts of the US, mandatory schooling and political pressures to be bilingual in English, the number of people dropped, and now, our youngest native speakers are in their 60s."

The Chickasaw nation is set up for success with more than 57,000 citizens, enough to sustain a radio station (broadcast online as well as on FM) and a newspaper. Its online resources are more plentiful and better maintained than even those for the Navajo language, which is estimated to have twice as many fluent speakers.

But while the web can be a great resource for an endangered language, despite being part of the threat, it's worth noting that endangered languages are concentrated in places that are also underserved by the internet. Does one have to forfeit the digital age and all it brings in order to preserve a culture? With an estimated 50-90 percent of languages slated to go extinct, broad efforts such as the Long Now's Rosetta Project, and the unfolding story of Chikashshanompa demonstrate that the internet can have a place in preservation too.