Online Classes Help Preserve the Navajo Language

When high school junior Reed Witherspoon heard about the Chief Manuelito Scholarship for high-achieving Navajo students, she knew she wanted it.

Not only did the scholarship offer $7,000 a year for college but it also came with a requirement she was happy to fulfill: To be eligible, she'd have to take courses on Navajo language and government. The return to her roots -- Witherspoon has two grandparents who speak Navajo -- would make her family happy, and it would be a small step toward keeping an endangered language from disappearing. The problem was finding a way to study the language in the first place.

Rare Resource

Signing up for Navajo isn't like enrolling in a French class. The tribe has scattered around the country to the point where nearly half its population now lives off the Navajo Nation reservation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Witherspoon lives in Montana, and she doesn't know of a single other Navajo student at her school. As the pool of potential teachers dwindles with each generation, the problem facing Witherspoon and other would-be Navajo-language students comes down to simple numbers: too few speakers spread out over too many miles.

Enter the American Academy, an online high school that offers classes in both Navajo language and Navajo government, among other subjects. For the first time, students around the country don't need to locate a nearby teacher or wait for sufficient interest to build up at their school. On the contrary, a student can be the only person for a thousand miles interested in learning Navajo. All it takes is Internet access and a weakness for agglutinative languages.

"Navajo is one of our most popular classes, out of 233," says Rebekah Richards, the American Academy's senior vice president of academic affairs and the virtual school's principal. "When you have a subject for which you need to have such expertise, and there just aren't enough people with that expertise, you can leverage a tool such as online education to cross a large geographic distance."

The teacher doing the leveraging is Ron Singer, a Utah resident who grew up on the reservation. Singer's primary work is private security; teaching Navajo a few hours each week for the American Academy is "more like a hobby," he says.

"It's a dying language," Singer notes. "My own kids don't speak it. This class is designed to help keep it from disappearing. Our language is how we keep our culture and tradition intact."

High Tech, Low Trouble

Neither the teacher nor students need anything higher tech than a computer with basic Internet access: Singer's primary tools are email and voicemail messages. He'll send out the latest vocabulary lesson -- on body parts, numbers, family relations, or colors or textures, for instance -- to his students, who later take a written test online.

When it comes to teaching pronunciation, Singer makes a voice recording, which the students can access online. The students, in turn, make recordings of their own by leaving voicemail messages at a designated phone number, which Singer assesses. All together, the classes involve 12 written tests and as many oral tests.

For her part, Witherspoon says the format works well for a motivated student already enrolled at a traditional high school during the day. "For people who work better on their own, it's great," she says. "If you put your mind to it, you can probably get even more done this way; you're not waiting for other students. In that way, it's more one-on-one."

It would be premature to say the class, which has about 50 students, will single-handedly restore Navajo to linguistic prominence. But Richards says the feedback has been strong, and the implications are broad. Around 550 of the world's languages are spoken by fewer than 100 people, and about 200 are spoken by fewer than 10 people, according to the National Virtual Translation Center.

The late Peter Ladefoged, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading authority on endangered languages until his death in 2006, predicted that half the languages in existence today will be gone within a century -- a common assessment in the field. If modern civilization helped bring so many ancient tongues to the brink of extinction, it might just produce the technology to save a few, too.

Lest aspiring speakers get ahead of themselves, Singer notes that students won't learn Navajo overnight. "It's one of the most difficult languages in the world, up there with Chinese and Finnish," he warns. "Will they speak it by the end? Oh, no! It's tonal, and it's got nasalized vowels -- you can study it for decades and never really be fluent."

Witherspoon was quickly struck by the language's complexity. "Unlike in Spanish and French, there are almost no cognates," she comments. "It's very unlike English. If I had to compare it to something, I'd maybe say it sounds Asian. You spend most of the first quarter just learning the sounds."

Cultural Revival

Still, Witherspoon says she intends to plow through and hopefully continue her study in the years ahead. "I've been out to the reservation and seen the culture, and it's amazing. It's like traveling to another country without leaving this one," she says. "I don't want something this important to a culture to vanish. It'd be like letting English die. No matter how small a population is, I don't think it's right to let a culture die."

The American Academy's Rebekah Richards says many of her school's students feel a similar draw to Singer's classes. Although the vast majority of students are high school age, she notes that a couple are in their 50s and "just always wanted to learn Navajo."

"It's a very personal thing for the students who come to us," Richards explains. "Being able to learn on their own terms is a powerful model and a powerful paradigm shift. It opens doors that weren't otherwise available to students. I think this is the epitome of what online learning can do."

Chris Colin writes the On the Job column for the San Francisco Chronicle and is the author of What Really Happened to the Class of '93.