View Content #25691

By Lindsay Marean, CASLS InterCom Editor

I’m a Potawatomi person, and I started learning the Potawatomi language about two decades ago. One of my language’s expressive tools is the internal structure of verb stems. A prototypical verb stem has three components: a root that often provides descriptive information, a medial whose meaning may include body parts or different kinds of materials, and a final whose meaning includes the sort of action (hitting, driving, talking, etc.) as well as the animacy of the entities involved. Here’s an example:

           Ngi-mzhiyabdégnama.   I knocked all his teeth out.

In this example, mzhi is a root associated with clearing things out; it’s used in words for clearing brush, for example. The medial yabdé has to do with teeth. The final gnam has to do with striking an animate entity (for example, a person). All together this stem creates the image of striking someone so that his/her teeth are cleared out, like a clearcut forest!

I’m passionate about my language, and I’m delighted when my elders share especially descriptive words like this one with me. Sometimes they’ll recall people who were elders when they themselves were young, and chuckle about the way they crafted words for extra impact. Naturally, when I learn a new root, medial, or final, I like to try it out by building new words and running them by my elders.

“Where did you hear that?” My elders respond to a word they haven’t heard before with suspicion. “That’s not a word.” Through these interactions, I am learning a certain ideology: since Potawatomi is endangered, some people, including my elders, are concerned that the language will undergo too many changes too quickly as my generation and younger people learn it. When I deliberately make up new words, it makes them worry that the words they grew up with will be lost, replaced by new ones. Their language ideology involves resisting language change and valuing older forms over newer ones.

Of course, this language ideology isn’t the only one in Potawatomi Country. There are other Potawatomi people who think it’s important to use the tools our language gives us to coin words for new things so that our language can continue to fully describe the modern world around us. Also, there is some overlap in ideologies. Our word for “phone” literally means “wire” (Remember when phones used to be connected to wires? Remember party lines?). One of my elders humorously coined a term for “cell phone” by calling it a wireless phone, which has the literal meaning in Potawatomi “wire that is not wire.”

As my fellow language activists and I work to carry Potawatomi on into the future, we must navigate these language ideologies. I can be most effective if I am aware of the ideologies that exist in Potawatomi country and how my identity as a language learner influences how my language choices will be received by different people.

In fact, it is a good idea for all language learners to explore language ideologies: both their own and those that can be found in the target culture. Doing so will inform their choices, such as whether to engage in language play (see our August 9 Topic of the Week article) or whether to use formal or informal registers in different situations. Our Activity of the Week guides learners to do exactly this, in a multi-step process that includes comparison with classmates’ and exchange partners’ ideologies.