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One Man’s Mission to Revive an Indigenous Language in Argentina

This Language Was Long Believed Extinct. Then One Man Spoke Up. 

Blas Jaime has spent nearly two decades resurrecting Chaná, an Indigenous language in Argentina that he learned from his mother. Blas Omar Jaime has, in many ways, placed the Chaná Indigenous group back on the map.

NYT (1/13/24), by Natalie Alcoba; Photographs and Video by Sebastián López Brach

To revive a half-dead language is not an easy task.

As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. Over yerba mate and torta fritas, his mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue.

The Chaná are an Indigenous people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined with the mighty Paraná River, the secondlongest in South America. They revered silence, considered birds their guardians and sang their babies lullabies: Utalá tapey-’é, uá utalá dioi — sleep little one, the sun has gone to sleep.

Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later, recently retired and seeking out people with whom he could chat, that he made a startling discovery: No one else seemed to speak Chaná. Scholars had longconsidered the language extinct.

“I said: ‘I exist. I am here,’” said Mr. Jaime, now 89, sitting in his sparse kitchen on the outskirts of Paraná, a midsize city in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos.

Those words kicked off a journey for Mr. Jaime, who has spent nearly two decades resurrecting Chaná and, in many ways, placing the Indigenous group back on the map. For UNESCO, whose mission includes the preservation of languages, he is a crucial vault of knowledge.

His painstaking work with a linguist has produced a dictionary of roughly 1,000 Chaná words. For people of Indigenous ancestry in Argentina, he is a beacon that has inspired many to connect with their history. And for Argentina, he is part of an important, if still fraught, reckoning over its history of colonization and Indigenous erasure.

“Language is what gives you identity,” Mr. Jaime said. “If someone doesn’t have their language, they’re not a people.”

In the countless encounters we've had with endangered and extinct languages, this is a constant theme:  language is tantamount to identity.  Loss of language is loss of identity.

…

Ms. Miguelina Yelón did not have any daughters to whom she could pass along her knowledge. (Her three daughters all died as children.)  So she turned to Mr. Jaime.

That is how he came to spend his afternoons soaking up stories of the Chaná, learning words that described their world: “atamá” means “river”; “vanatí beáda” is “tree”; “tijuinem” means “god”; “yogüin” is “fire.”

His mother warned him not to share what he knew with anyone. “From the time we were born, we hid our culture, because in those days, ;you were discriminated against for being aboriginal,” he said.

…

One of the first to publicize him was Daniel Tirso Fiorotto, a journalist who worked for La Nación, a national newspaper.

“I knew that this was a treasure,” said Mr. Fiorotto, who tracked Mr. Jaime down and published his first story in March 2005. “I left there
amazed.”

After reading Mr. Fiorotto’s article, Pedro Viegas Barros, a linguist, also met with Mr. Jaime and found a man who clearly had fragments ofa language, even if it had eroded with the lack of use.

The meeting marked the start of a yearslong collaboration. Mr. Viegas Barros wrote several papers on the process of trying to recover the language, and he and Mr. Jaime published a dictionary that included legends and Chaná rituals.

According to UNESCO, at least 40 percent of the world’s languages — or more than 2,600 — were under threat of disappearing in 2016 because they were spoken by a relatively small number of people, the latest year for which reliable data is available.

Referring to Mr. Jaime, Serena Heckler, a program specialist at the UNESCO regional office in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital, said, “We are very aware of the importance of what he’s doing.”

While his work preserving Chaná is not the only case of a language once thought dead suddenly reappearing, it is exceptionally rare, Ms. Heckler said.

…

If it happened with Chaná and with Hebrew, it can happen with Manchu.

 

Selected readings

• "'Misaharan ini na punapunan' — indigenous languages in Taitung, Taiwan" (12/31/23)
• "The linguistic plenitude of Papua New Guinea" (12/29/23)
• "Experiencing language death" (6/23/09) — about the PNG language Usarufa
• "Tocharian Bilingualism and Language Death in the Old Turkic Context" (12/21/23)

[h.t. François Lang]

January 16, 2024 @ 9:35 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language extinction, Language preservation

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