SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah linguist says dozens of native languages across the Americas could disappear within a few generations with the downsizing of a prominent university program.
The University of Utah recently announced it was closing the Center for American Indian Languages because of shrinking resources and the departure of its founder Lyle Campbell.
The College of Humanities instead will concentrate language-preservation efforts on Utah’s tribal tongues.
The narrower mission undermines the university’s academic credibility, grumbles Jeff Pynes, a doctoral candidate who was doing research at the native-language center. A 2006 Berkeley graduate, Pynes was drawn to the University of Utah by its reputation for language preservation.
As part of his work, Pynes has made dozens of extended visits with the Tolupan and other indigenous people of Central America, recording their speech and stories in an effort to document their words, syntax and grammar.
Ives Goddard, a senior linguist with the Smithsonian Institution who served on the Utah center’s advisory board, says the academic discipline is “not just about rescuing some cute little language.”
Rather, “it’s learning about human intellectual capacity in general,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune . “The goal is to find the universal hard-wire blueprint for language everyone is born with.”
