NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

For each Inacha'igen Fino' CHamoru, the Chamorro Studies and Chamoru language faculty at UOG collect or produce a handful of creative and expressive texts in the language. These texts are used as part of the competition for these categories, Lalai (chant), Rinisådan Po'ema ( poetry recitation) and Tinaitai Koru (choral reading). Students have to memorize and then recite or perform these either as individuals or as a group. For the longest time, there wasn't a lot produced creatively in the Chamoru language. Most of it could be found in terms of music, as Chamorus were making songs, releasing albums and performing. Much of the publication and promotion of Chamoru could be found in the church, but little of it was creative. Much of it was translations of things written elsewhere in the Catholic universe and localized to Guam. In this way, the church preserved words and meanings in Chamoru, it helped teach and propagate the language, but it wasn't a venue for Chamoru

A few years ago, the University of Guam underwent a long discussion over the changing of its GE or General Education requirements for students. The intent was to update the system and lower the overall credit requirement. No system reform can ever be perfect or make all stakeholders happy, but this overhaul seemed to be strangely arbitrary and disconnected from UOG's mission, purpose or advantages as an educational institution. For most of its existence, you could argue that UOG was a colonial institution. You could argue that it continues to be one today. When I say colonial, it is not meant to describe that it came from the outside and therefore it implicitly bad. This is something that has been and can continue to be argued over forever. When I say colonial, I am invoking it to refer to the type of education it provides. How it is rooted and what it is meant to do. All cultures have some form of education and that education comes with different intents, to teach certain thin

If you believe that the University of Guam should support bilingualism and encourage through its curriculum the learning of the many languages from this region and beyond, please read below the statement of our "UOG Language Drive." Faculty and administrators at UOG are planning on reducing the required language classes for undergraduates from 2 to just 1 next year. This would reduce the language learning for all students from a single year (8 credits) to just a single semester (4 credits). Students could still take more courses if they wanted to, or if their major required it, but in general this will lead to a severely negative impact on any programs, such as mine, Chamorro Studies that are language focused. Please read this statement, written by a group of faculty including myself, and consider signing our Protect Languages at UOG Petition . ******************** The purpose of this signature drive is to promote and to advance language learning at the University of Gu

One of the most irritating things about life on Guam is that the island is incredibly multilingual as well as multicultural, but because of our colonial past and present, we tend to force everything into very unfortunate monolingual frameworks. It is important to be able to see past the colonial examples presented by the United States and look at the rest of the world, especially where small language communities, who are in similar situations as Chamorros, are struggling to promote and preserve their indigenous tongues. Here are some articles to consider in this regard. *************************** Bilingual Street Signs Herald a New Era of Language Revitalization by Frank Hopper 2/29/16 Indian Country Today Media Network In 1990, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe estimates only eight people knew how to speak the Klallam language. Now they’re putting it on street signs. Earlier this month, the city of Port Angeles, on the north end of Washington State’s Olympic

If you were to ask me what type of music is my favorite, I will always say Chamorro music. It isn't really that I like every single Chamorro song, but I will purchase every single Chamorro CD or record I can get my hands on, in order to support one of the main ways that the Chamorro language persisted even during the generations which were quietly trying to silence it by not teaching it to their children. Chamorro musicians deserve far more support and credit than most people give them. They are, within recent Chamorro history, the ones who played the most significant, but unheralded role in keeping the language spoken and alive. While most families did not speak it to their children, collections of singers decided to keep using the language to make music, despite immense pressure to simply sing in English and Americanize the way everything else seemed to be going. Within that collection of musicians a few names stand out more than others. There are those who had their names on t

Call for Papers Amerasia Journal's latest call for papers PACIFIC LANGUAGES IN DIASPORA Guest Editors: Professor Serge Tcherkezoff (Anthropology, French Institute of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) Professor Luafata Simanu-Klutz (Samoan Language and Literature, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa) Dr. Akiemi Glenn (Te Taki Tokelau Community Training and Development) Publication Date: Issue planned for Spring 2017 publication. Due Date: Paper submissions (up to 5,000 words) due June 1, 2016 Change is native to the world of Epeli Hau‘ofa’s “sea of islands,” where the ocean has historically connected people and served as a thoroughfare for the flow of resources, culture, and ideas. The Pacific is home to the richest linguistic diversity on our planet and yet many of the native languages of the region are under threat and many more have been lost. As the currents of colonization, globalization, and climate change carry Pacific people far beyond their homel

--> So much of the problems with saving dying languages is that people don't understand how languages live and die. They make assumptions about what makes a language necessary or valuable or what might be killing a language or keeping it alive, and often times those interpretations feel real, but actually bear little connection to reality. People fear that certain things which don't actually threat languages are holding knives to the throats of the language. People who have the abilities to save the language, wait passively for Superman or Maga'lahi Hurao to appear to give them salvation in the form of a curriculum or an app. This is, one of the biggest frustrations of my life recently, is struggling to find ways to revitalize the Chamorro language, but bumping up against so many stubbornly held misconceptions, which have to be challenged, or at least disrupted slightly for any language resurgence to take place. People become too obsessed, conveniently so, wit

One of the articles I am working on this Fanuchan'an is about language revitalization in Guam and the "beautiful lie" or "gefpago na dinagi" that hinders our ability to protect and revitalize our endangered languages. What I refer to as the beautiful lie stage is the point at which language attitudes that once naturalized the uselessness of a native language have been reversed and that a once maligned language is now celebrated, but that the celebration of the language does not necessarily lead to any revitalization. It can lead to commemoration, promotion, to preservation but the beautiful lie is that while the beauty of the language is now an accepted truth, this does not meant that people will actually use it, teach it or see it as something viable and necessary to keep alive. I first got to present this idea at an Endangered Island Language Forum last year at Ryukyu University in Okinawa. I have a couple more months until I have to take my presentation a

--> The Chamorro language is as old as we are. It is an Austronesian language, which means it bear similarities to many languages throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia. It connects us to those cultures even up until today. Here below is a short history of our language. Gof ti kabales este, lao para Hamyo ni' taitiningo' put i lenguahi yan i estoria-na, este un tinana' ha'. Puede ha' ya-mu, yan nina'malago' hao nu mas.  *************** In Ancient times the ability to use the Chamorro language creatively distinguished one above all others. At large gatherings, those who could recall in vivid details the glorious history of their family, twist phrases to make an opponent seem silly in debate, or create in a spontaneous moment a song that would evoke all sort of emotions, were considered to be the height of Chamorro society. The first grammar book for the Chamorro language was created by Pale' San Vitores. He became fluent in Chamor