The Learner Varieties of the Chikasha Academy: Chickasaw Adult Language Acquisition, Change, and Revitalization

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on a specific language revitalization method used by the Chickasaw Nation, currently located in Oklahoma. Language revitalization refers to any effort intended to increase the use of a language, usually an endangered language that has a decreasing number of speakers. The Chickasaw language is severely endangered, with an estimated 50 native speakers who are all over the age of sixty. As part of their language revitalization efforts, Chickasaw Nation has created the Chikasha Academy, a program designed to teach the language to adults. The goal of the program is to produce conversationally proficient adult speakers after two years in the Academy. This research has focused on the successes of the learners in the Academy as they learn their language. This dissertation analyzes how the adult learners in the Chikasha Academy are learning the language, in terms of: 1) what they learn, 2) what order they learn it in, and 3) what level they reach in their learning after one year. Specifically, the research focuses on the learners’ morphosyntax (how they create words and sentences) and discourse (how they connect their sentences). Expectedly, when compared to both published descriptions of Chickasaw, which are based on native speakers, and the speech of the native speakers involved in the Chikasha Academy program, the adult learners’ morphosyntax and discourse structures have noticeable differences. However, what they learn successfully far outweighs these differences. In the Chikasha Academy, several adult learners meet daily with native speakers for structured immersion sessions. All sessions are recorded by the Chickasaw Nation and these recordings are the main data analyzed in this dissertation. Supplementing this data are interviews with speakers and learners involved in the Academy. I interviewed both speakers and learners about their lives and language use, asking them open-ended questions. Speakers were additionally interviewed with grammaticality judgment tasks, which used recordings of learner utterances and asked speakers to give their impressions and judgments about what they heard. The judgment tasks allow the true experts of the language, the Chickasaw speakers, to determine what changes are acceptable. Given the current situation of Chickasaw, the adult learners in the Chikasha Academy will soon be the only living speakers of the language and will be the future teachers of the language. Many Native North American communities are in similar situations, and yet few adult language learning studies of Native North American languages exist. For Chickasaw Nation, the results of this dissertation directly assist in the improvement of their language revitalization efforts during this critical time. The results may also assist other language revitalization programs in similar situations. This dissertation research also contributes to our understanding of adult second language acquisition and language change, particularly in the context of language revitalization.