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As many linguists continue to work with and analyze First Nations/Native American languages, the consensus opinion usually direly predicts the loss of daily use for almost all of the extant Indigenous languages.1 Tremendous efforts are being expended for renewing, revitalizing, and restoring these languages to everyday use. The model upon which much Native American language renewal research is based—second language acquisition or second language learning (henceforth-sla/l)—at first seemingly provides relevant correspondence with the ensuing attributes, but I will argue that the sla/l models of characteristics do not apply to Native American language acquisition/learning circumstances. Reversing language shift and language loss is a crucial issue in many Native American communities. In Canada First Nations communities are currently experiencing critical shift and loss. The 1991 census in Canada reports disturbingly low numbers of fluent ancestral language speakers. Historically, cultural opposition, enforced assimilation, government exploitation, and missionaries succeeded in reducing the use of many Native American languages. These efforts not only strove to eliminate Native American languages but the culture of their speakers as well. The main tool used in reducing and eliminating ancestral language use was formal education within a strict English-only setting. The residential schools' legacy encompasses not only the transition to a formal education setting but the systematic eradication of the culture of each First Nations student.2 Only within the last quarter of the twentieth century have the Canadian and American governments implemented efforts to address the problem of reversing language shift among its Indigenous people. [End Page 91] Currently, the problem for the majority of the First Nations communities across Canada is the absence of any speakers acquiring the ancestral language as a mother tongue.3 Children are simply not learning their ancestral language. Lack of community efforts exacerbates the problem, and more often than not the main effort to salvage Native American languages falls on the local school board. The result is that many Native American students now learn or study their ancestral language only as a second language within a school context. The problem is that when Native American students study a language in school, it usually stays in the school. Reversing language shift is crucial, but a paradigm that recognizes the limitations of sla/l theories and methodologies in regard to Native American Indigenous languages is necessary. The characteristics of sla/l models have salient implications that demand rethinking the content and context of what is happening on reserves and reservations of Native American communities. In this article I provide a brief review of research on North American Indigenous languages and assess the applicability of sla/l characteristics upon current Indigenous languages. I conclude with recommendations to reconsider further research among Indigenous communities apart from the sla/l paradigm. A Brief Historical Background on Native American Languages A very brief historical background of research and linguistic endeavors among First Nations/Native Americans culminates in the early part of twentieth century when Franz Boas began to systematically document First Nations/Native American languages.4 His approach, as well as that of his protégés, was to provide a grammar of the language in order to record the tremendous intricacies that he assumed would be found in the languages that were studied. The methodology provided a phonological, lexical, and syntactical analysis as well as some narratives that were transcribed and translated with a representative dictionary for reference.5 The later work in the field represented efforts at analyzing and categorizing the languages into linguistic families in order to have a speculative basis for understanding the diversity and dispersal of the languages.6 The result was a body of work that looked at the languages for the sake of classification, and though a central part of the research analyzed the [End Page 92] similarities of the languages among First Nations/Native American peoples, only a trace of actual language usage was studied. The ensuing efforts confirmed the categorization of the various languages that were...
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