"Our Beloved Cherokee": A Naturalistic Study of Cherokee Preschool Language Immersion

This article contributes to our knowledge of endangered language revitalization by offering a case study of a Cherokee Nation (CN) preschool immersion program named Tsalagi Ageyui, "Our Beloved Cherokee." A naturalistic inquiry into the micro- and macrosociocultural dimensions of reversing Cherokee language shift reveals that, of all CN language programs, Tsalagi Ageyui holds the greatest potential to increase intergenerational, mother-tongue transmission in the home, family, neighborhood, and community.     

Redefining the Ojibwe Classroom: Indigenous Language Programs within Large Research Universities

Indigenous languages are powerful symbols of self-determination and sovereignty for tribal communities in the United States, and many community-based programs have been developed to support and maintain them. The successes of these programs, however, have been difficult to replicate at large research institutions. This article examines the issues of incorporating Indigenous languages into the university system by focusing on a series of language events developed as part of the Ojibwe language program at Michigan State University. These language events demonstrate a way for communities to participate in and maintain control of Indigenous language programs despite their location in nontribal educational institutions.     

Japanese attitudes towards foreign languages

The purpose of this study is to clarify Japanese attitudes towards foreign languages based on the kinds and changes of TV and radio programs that aired on the Japanese national broadcasting station (NHK) between 1955 and 2000. Foreign language programs are classified into three groups according to their content: 1) cultivation, 2) education, or 3) communication. For Japanese people, foreign languages are the measures of intelligence and intellect. Studying a foreign language is considered a sign of intelligence whether or not it is used for actual communication. The number of foreign language programs has increased tremendously since 1965 in part because the global economy has brought many countries in such close contact. Since 1990, programs for the purpose of communication have increased because of the necessity to communicate with foreign people. Japanese attitudes towards studying foreign languages have been changing gradually from an intellectual purpose to a communication purpose.     

Do "Language Rights" Serve Indigenous Interests? Some Hopi and Other Queries

While valuable, the discourse of language rights neglects language use in cultural, social, and historical contexts. This article examines some implications of that neglect, especially vis-a-vis small-scale, indigenous, "oral" societies. Drawing principally on Hopi examples, I argue that language rights discourse rests on a reflexivization of language and culture enhanced by globalism. Now reified, language becomes an allegory of ethnic identity. Preexisting sociolinguistic sensibilities get repositioned, for example, in Native Americancommunities in which language has hitherto been deployed as a technique of privacy and sovereignty, language rights ideology islogocentric and presumes a democratic, secular space of language use, conflicting with both privacy and performativity in Native linguisticvalues. And some linguistic usage reinforces social inequality, both transnationally and group-internally: Here, language rights contradict other human rights. Language rights discourse also requires anthropology to rethink its recent antipathy to the culture concept and to treat language and culture objectively. [Keywords: language rights, sociolinguistic values, sovereignty, logocentrism, globalism]     

Tribal Languages and the Challenges of Revitalization

Although school- and university-based language programs can help strengthen threatened Indigenous languages, language revitalization at its heart involves reestablishing traditional functions of language use in the context of everyday speaker interactions. The inherent dynamics of Native oral language traditions suggest the limitations of institutions in supporting critical language learning activities that are the key to successful language renewal efforts.     

The Development of an Indigenous Knowledge Program in a New Zealand Maori-Language Immersion School

In 1985, Te Wharekura o Rakaumangamanga initiated a Maori-language immersion program for children ages 5 through 18. In recent years, a program based on Waikato-Tainui tribal epistemology has been incorporated into the language immersion program. This article describes the community context and the language immersion and tribal knowledge programs. We consider the relationship of these programs to individual and tribal self-determination and to theories of minority achievement, particularly the work of John Ogbu.     

Improved programs for DNA and protein sequence analysis on the IBM personal computer and other standard computer systems.

We have previously described programs for a variety of types of sequence analysis (1-4). These programs have now been integrated into a single package. They are written in the standard C programming language and run on virtually any computer system with a C compiler, such as the IBM/PC and other computers running under the MS/DOS and UNIX operating systems. The programs are widely distributed and may be obtained from the authors as described below.     

Situational Designations in "Glossoethnographic" Perspective

Soviet and foreign linguists and educators continually stress the importance of studying a foreign language within its cultural context. Accordingly, a new field of applied linguistics has emerged, at the borderline between linguistics and foreign language instruction, that we have termed "glossoethnography" [see 1, 2, 4, 61. This new area of linguistics has not yet sufficiently delimited i t s subject matter: it abuts on other areas that are also relatively new and as yet ill defined, such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, linguistic typology (for the various definitions of these disciplines, see reference 7). The many interesting examples adduced in studies in this new area all deal with specific national features of linguistic means of expression (sometimes in combination with paralinguistic means). However, these specific features exist on different levels: there are the specific features of the real objects expressed in language, and then there are those of the linguistic forms themselves, which are independent of the properties of the real objects to which they refer.     

Computer programs for the analysis and the management of DNA sequences.

A program package is described for the management and the analysis of DNA sequence data. The programs - with the exception of a few Fortran routines - are written in the programming language APL. They are best used interactively although batch processing is possible. The package has been in constant use for about 3 years and contains programs for most of the routine problems presently found in a DNA sequencing laboratory.     

Native Language Teachers in a Struggle for Language and Cultural Survival

Language shift among New Mexico Pueblo Indians threatens the loss of their oral-based cultures. Language revival for many Pueblos has resulted in school programs in which students are easily accessible and teachers are accountable to tribes rather than the state. Finding "Pueblo space" for the Native language in school, where it was previously targeted for extinction, poses unique challenges. Personal histories and ethnographic interviews provide language teacher perspectives on teaching in four separate school programs.     

Apple Macintosh programs for nucleic and protein sequence analyses

This paper describes a package of programs for handling and analyzing nucleic acid and protein sequences using the Apple Macintosh microcomputer. There are three important features of these programs: first, because of the now classical Macintosh interface the programs can be easily used by persons with little or no computer experience. Second, it is possible to save all the data, written in an editable scrolling text window or drawn in a graphic window, as files that can be directly used either as word processing documents or as picture documents. Third, sequences can be easily exchanged with any other computer. The package is composed of thirteen programs, written in Pascal programming language.     

CRANK: new methods for automated macromolecular crystal structure solution

CRANK is a novel suite for automated macromolecular structure solution and uses recently developed programs for substructure detection, refinement, and phasing. CRANK utilizes methods for substructure detection and phasing and combines them with existing crystallographic programs for density modification and automated model building in a convenient and easy-to-use CCP4i graphical interface. The data model used conforms to the XML eXtensible Markup Language specification and works as a common language to communicate data between many different applications inside and outside of the suite. The application of CRANK on various test cases has yielded promising results: with minimal user input, CRANK can produce better quality solutions over currently available programs.     

The honey bee "language" controversy

The controversy between the honey bee “language” hypothesis and the olfactory hypothesis, is essentially a controversy between a human-level hypothesis and an insect-level hypothesis, for an insect. A careful analysis of the theoretical process which underlies the design of experiments and interpretation of results, demonstrates that the proof that honey bees can use a “language” of abstract symbols, remains as inconclusive and non-valid as ever.     

"Ma'iingan Is Just a Misspelling of the Word Wolf": A Case for Teaching Culture through Language

Framed by the English language and positioned as a distinct subject, Ojibwe culture and language are often appreciated by students rather than taught for a deeper understanding or fluency, or used as the language of instruction in tribal schools. Ojibwe culture and language have been "added on" to existing school curriculum, an approach that changes the meaning of culture. In this article I critique the add-on approach and propose that teaching through the Indigenous language (immersion) supports cultural and language revitalization in a more fundamental way.     

Development and implementation of a general compiler to produce specific programs for minicomputer control of physiological experiments in real time

A method for automatic generation of specific FORTRAN programs to control physiological experiments with a computer was developed. The general real-time software package is built into a high level language (MAB = MAcro Basic). From this package, the scientist can automatically generate for him/herself specific programs for controlling his own experiments by a simple procedure. The generated programs contain only the relevant code, adjusted dimensions of arrays, names of parameters, and formatting for printing of tables and graphics for the particular experiment. Therefore, the resulting program is efficient both in terms of memory utilization and in execution time.     

"Nature" and "environment" in German and Portuguese sustainable development strategies for Johannesburg 2002

The recent Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development was an important symbolic moment, in spite of the poor results some people claim to have emerged from it. The very fact that official written texts were produced for a wide discussion in many participating countries is a positive side-effect, as it enables the almost unique possibility of using parallel corpora for the analysis of the respective language and underlying assumptions. This could lead to the identification of some potential causes for conflicts and misunderstandings. Both texts were produced according to a (supposedly, at least) common intention, so they may be seen as functionally equivalent. In spite of that, there are obviously huge differences, not only in extension, but also in the type of lexical combinations and stylistic features used. Words like ambiente, in the Portuguese language, and Umwelt, in German, as well as natureza/Natur, appear in very different lexical environments, so that one can, by means of a distributive methodology, obtain a picture of what might be intended with their use in the two countries. Another issue brought about by this analysis was a reflection on the concept of "foreign" language. This raises the question not only of knowing whether, or to what extent, written texts like these are really intended to have an effect on (local) people's minds, but also about pragmatic/cultural constraints that have influenced their very shaping.     

The use of pigment "fingerprints" in the study of harmful algal blooms

Along the Mexican coast, harmful algae blooms (HAB) have become more frequent, and therefore, there is an urgent need to establish monitoring programs to avoid the undesired consequences of HAB in human and natural ecosystems. In this work, we analyzed the pigment signatures and the species composition from phytoplankton samples to evaluate the utility of the specific pigment "fingerprints" in HAB monitoring programs. Vertical profiles from a coastal lagoon and temporal samples of a red tide occurring in a shrimp-culture pond and in a coastal zone were taken into consideration. Between 76% and 84% of dinoflagellate and diatom cell density was explained by their specific signature variation, in both vertical and temporal samples. Only the variation of zeaxanthin and the cyanobacteria Anabaena sp. showed a poor relationship, probably from difficulties in counting other cyanobacteria present in the samples examined with the microscopic method. These results suggest that inclusion of pigment analysis in the study and monitoring programs dealing with harmful algae would be very useful.     

Attitudes toward the use of gender-inclusive language among residency trainees

OBJECTIVE: To explore postgraduate medical trainees'' attitudes toward the use of gender-inclusive language. DESIGN: Self-administered questionnaire. SETTING: Seven residency training programs at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., from July 1993 to June 1994. PARTICIPANTS: Of 225 residents in the programs, 186 responded to the survey, for a response rate of 82.7%. Men and women were equally represented among the respondents. OUTCOME MEASURES: Categorization of attitudes about the use of language as gender-inclusive or gender-exclusive; characteristics predicting a gender-inclusive attitude. RESULTS: Factor analysis and Cronbach''s alpha (0.90) supported the existence of a construct related to attitudes about language use, the poles of which were categorized as gender-inclusive and gender-exclusive. The authors classified residents with respect to their attitudes to language use from their responses to the questionnaire. In univariate analyses, sex, residency program and country of graduation significantly predicted a gender-inclusive attitude (p < 0.01). Only the first 2 variables were significant in a multivariate model; residency program explained 18% of the variance and sex 3%. Residents in obstetrics and gynecology and psychiatry had the most gender-inclusive attitudes, whereas residents in surgery and anesthesia had the most gender-exclusive attitudes. CONCLUSIONS: Residents'' values are reflected in the language they choose to use. Language use may provide an index of underlying attitudes that may create hostile environments for female trainees.