The geographical focus of this paper is that defined by the organizers of the Language South of Rio Bravo Conference (9-10 January 1995). My intention is to compare creoles and Native American languages (NAL) and to argue that, unlike NALs, most creoles, which are spoken primarily by people of African descent, are not dying. Since both kinds of language varieties may be considered ethnographically low compared to the state languages of the geographical areas where they are spoken, this difference in adaptiveness calls for an explanation

I argue that with regard to language attrition and death NALs should be compared to the languages which the Africans brought over with them in captivity; most of NALs are only now undergoing what African languages in the New World suffered from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. These differences in timing reflect the differential way the colonization of the New World has affected different ethnic groups.

This paper is thus an invitation to reflect more on some of the ethnographic factors which produce language attrition and eventually language death. I argue against one of the reasons often invoked recently about NALs: lack of pride in them. I assume that adaptation to changing ecology is a central factor in language attrition and death, using the term ecology herein a sense that is not necessarily physical, although not totally remote from it.

To put things in perspective, even though several linguists have now become very concerned with the attrition and loss of several languages around the world, notably here in the New World, language death does not seem to be a novel phenomenon brought about only by our time. Looking back in history, the process of death seems to have occurred more than once, associated with one or another form of domination. Let us take for instance the case of Romance languages. What is typically talked about in the literature is the death of latin, which may actually be reinterpreted to have survived through its offspring French, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, Rumanian, and Romansch. What has usually been forgotten is the protracted loss of, for instance, the Gaulish (Celtic) languages then spoken in today's France. The struggle of Breton-advocates is a contemporary reminder of a process of language death which probably did not become complete until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the United Kingdom, it is not clear how many other Celtic languages yielded to the spread of English, but the case of Gaelic (Dorian 1983) gives us an idea. In colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, languages such as Twa (spoken by the Pygmies in the forests of Central Africa) and Khoikhoi (spoken by the Hottentots/Khoikhois in the Kalahari Desert) are reminders that in migrating eastwards and southwards from the Western part of Africa, the Bantu did not move into uninhabited territories and that the people who either assimilated or succumbed to their invasions lost their then indigenous languages. In the process, if genetic theones of Bantu reconstruction are correct, hundreds of Bantu languages have developed.

What I wish to present through these brief reminders is a version of linguistic Danvinisn, different from that of August Schleicher in the nineteenth century. I do not espouse his view of linguistic typological evolution and, more importantly for this essay, I analogize 'language' with 'species' or 'population' in population genetics.

Accordingly, the survival of populations depends largely on how their members adapt to changing ecological conditions. In this analogy, one must keep in mind that populations are constructs suggested by individuals which share traits; they are groupings that are reminiscent of notions such as categories. A population is said to be dying when there is attrition in the number of its individual members, when the rate of successful reproduction among its members is exceeded by the rate of failure, or when its members carry fewer and fewer of the genes which distinguish them from other species with which its members were (originally) in competition.

Likewise, languages are categories constructed from idiolects, the individual members of which they are set-theory unions (Mufwene 1994). A language is said to be in attrition either when it has fewer speakers, a case of unsuccessful reproduction/transmission, or when its structures are eroded, an effect of assimilation in an ethnographic setting (or ecology!) in which another language prevails, as in the case of Sutherland Gaelic Dorian 1983). Either way, a population or language disappears and that is what has recently concerned several linguists, such as Hale (1992) and Krauss (1992).

I note all the above not because I condone the condition of the moribund languages in question but because I think that we are not likely to save them if all we recommend is multi-lingual policies and pride in the indigenous languages of the Americas. We must examine, as I try below, why speakers of several of them, NALs in the case of the New World, have chosen to adapt to changing ecologies the way they have. I think linguists are mistaken in focusing on pride (e.g., Watahomigie and Yamamoto 1992)--at least this is not the reason why several urban African children are not interested in their ethnic languages nor why their parents are not putting any pressure on them to acquire those languages. As noted by Ladefoged (1992), they are not even worried by this state of affairs.

As we should remember, the colonization of the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not endanger the NALs to the same extent as do post-colonial assimilation forces now, although its effects on the coastal language constituency was undoubtedly more destructive than in the hinterlands. To be sure, as observed by Crosby (1991), diseases of the Old World, more than their weapons, took a fatal toll on several Native Americans, which of course reduced the numbers of speakers of several languages and drove a few of these to extinction. The relocation of several Native Americans also led to contacts among themselves which caused some of their languages to die. However, this contact crisis did not prevent the Native Americans who survived from transmitting successfully in their communities the languages which held out.

In those colonial days, the languages of the enslaved Africans and several European indentured servants of non-British origin were more endangered locally than those of the surviving Native Americans. Creole children of African descent were less likely to speak their parents' languages than Native American children were. A concomitant of the loss of African languages in the New World, according to this oversimplified history, was the development of disfranchised new varieties of their lexifiers which first the Europeans and, later, linguists decided to identify as creoles or semi-creoles (Mufwene 1995).

The reason for this differential toll on populations' languages lies, perhaps only partially but critically enough, on the differential involvement of populations in the development of the colonial Americas. History so far suggests alienation and/or marginalization of Native Americans while the Europeans were building their settlement colonies using indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa. North American reservations and South American rain forests today are undeniable reminders of this settlement trend. On the other hand, the African slaves and European indentured servants were integrated in economic systems in which differential success was determined largely by one's mastery of the dominant colonial language. Among the Africans, lack of a common African language, compounded with the need to communicate with their masters, led them generally to adopt a European lexifier from which their new, creole vernaculars developed thanks also to racial segregation. Here we must keep in mind the dualism that marked the attitude of Europeans to the Africans in especially British and French colonies: On the one hand, the British and French integrated the Africans in their economic systems by treating them as part of the infrastructure, on the other, the former marginalized the latter through the institutionalization of segregation. Thus while there was pressure on the Africans to acquire their masters' languages even in order to communicate among themselves, segregation, generally institutionalized in the eighteenth century, made it impossible for most of them to have direct exposure to native varieties, unlike their European indentured cohorts. Consequently, they developed their own norms and varieties which are lexically similar to those of their European cohorts but structurally different in a number of ways, even if not as drastically as the literature may suggest.

In especially the British and French colonies, Native Americans in their own indigenous communities then did not experience the same linguistic pressures, at least not until the nineteenth century, when Native American kids were taken to "boarding schools[,] where they were beaten for speaking their own languages" (Tony Woodbury, p.c., 10 April 1995). Success in switching to the European language and operating in the European economic machine was of course at the expense of NALs. These became more endangered after more and more Native Americans saw in the switch to the European languages an opportunity for participating in the current economic machine. The languages thus became endangered in the fashion which concerns us today after they too became integrated in the economic machine and success was conditioned in part by fluency in its language.

For the Native Americans participating in this economic system, especially their children going to school with the rest of American now mixed populations, things boil down to a game of survival in the current socio-economic ecologies in which the languages of power are not Native American. It is a matter of what attributes one must possess or acquire in order to succeed, regardless of the cost in one's cultural heritage. (I return to this below.) For many of them, the answer is not the NALs, sadly but realistically.

Although bilingualism is of course a wise alternative, it is a difficult one to sustain in especially city life, where most of the businesses are and where one does not have to deal with aspects of Native American cultures on a regular basis and the motivation for using NALs as vernaculars dwindle to few occasions. The reason for this situation is in part the monopoly of European languages on the media and the pervasive role of these in everybody's everyday life. Even aspects of Native American cultures may be discussed in these languages of the powerful economic machines, as inadequately as this discourse may capture them.

Under such pressure to become fluent in the languages of the powerful, the motivation for being bilingual in both the NALs and the dominant language is an ethnographic burden to be experienced only by the minorities who are thereby still not accommodated. This burden may be downplayed only by those who are ideologically committed to their ethnic identities, driven by, for instance, belief in the strong spiritual force associated with the languages and encouraged perhaps by life outside the city and the desolate reservations. The more integrated the socio-economic systems become and the more luring life in the city gets, the less likely the costly bilingual approach is to succeed if applied only to minorities, except where conscious ideological motivation is well sustained. As those in the city set the trend for those in the rural areas, including the reservations, the European languages continue to gain grounds, despite their deficiencies in conveying the cultural values and distinctions of the NALs.

Something may be learned, even if only indirectly, from the contact of European and indigenous languages in Africa. One important factor which accounts for differences in the fates of indigenous languages in the two continents is that colonization in Africa was predominantly of the exploitation kind, whereas it was typically of the settlement kind in the Americas. In colonial Africa, few Africans were invited/motivated to succeed in the colonial economic machines intended to develop Europe. The majorities of African populations were rural, where European cultural influence remained marginal, indigenous cultures continued to thrive, and the indigenous languages continued to be transmitted successfully.

Pressure to switch to some other language was characteristic of the city, exploitation centers, and Christian missions. However, as they were not fully integrated in the economic machines, the Africans in such environments often continued to live in neighborhoods based on ethnicity or regional backgrounds, so that at least for several generations of parents the city languages associated with the economic machines were spoken only as lingua francas and indigenous languages continued to serve as vernaculars in the neighborhoods, especially in small towns. Moreover, these lingua francas were typically African, not the European official languages which to date have integrated only very small proportions of the African populations, the elite.

Interestingly, several African ethnic languages have become endangered after the countries in which they are spoken became independent, when competition for success became defined dichotomically among Africans and was no longer between Africans and the European colonists, the foreigners, and when fluency in the city lingua francas became an important factor in evaluating one's adaptive success. Thanks to the ethnic integration of neighborhoods there has been less and less motivation for large proportions of the younger generations to command or learn one's ethnic language even for the purposes of ethnic identity. As more and more people marry members of different ethnic groups and the lingua francas become the vernaculars in such households, their children tend to speak these lingua francas as their mother tongues and the only other languages they try to command are other lingua francas which enable them to communicate more widely, as well as, in fewer cases, the local European official language, which promises them access to power. Increasingly these non-ethnic, urban citizens are being emulated by rural kids who migrate to the city. Thus, more and more ethnic languages have fallen into attrition in the city, even if for most of them there is no danger of extinction in the rural areas. That is, the survival of several African ethnic languages depends largely on what effect rural exodus has on the overall populations speaking the relevant languages.

An important lesson from the African situation is that for most speakers language is part of adaptive behavior, rather than a simple matter of communication. Several people ask themselves what they are going to do with a particular language in an ethnographic arena where several of them are in competition (Laitin 1992). Especially if one's identity has conspicuous nonlinguistic markers (cf. Giles' 1979 "hard boundaries"), the role of language as a marker of identity may become questionable. Matters of practicality often prevail, especially those considerations which have to do with day-to-day communication needs. In the new socio-economic and ethnographic ecology in which the economic machine plays a central role in organizing one's life and determining several social relations, the NALs face a strong challenge in part because they limit the range of a monolingual speaker's social interaction. The bilingual may wonder what rewards are to be gain by this additional proficiency. Native Americans, especially those living in the city, may wonder whether their ethnic identities and loyalties to their respective ethnic groups are indeed compromised by not being fluent in their respective NALs. Pride in and (commitment to the) preservation of cultural traditions alone will not do the job of preserving the languages, even in promoting bilingualism, unless the question of rewards is also addressed.

Rewards other than the preservation of cultural and linguistic traditions (Woodbury1993) is what linguists seem to have paid little attention to. Several Native Americans may feel comfortable with preserving cultural traditions along with the ritual language associated with them, without however using their respective NALs as vernaculars. The failure to speak the NALs as vernaculars is an adaptive response to the present socio-economic and ethno-graphic ecologies. It takes making changes in these ecologies, without always imposing it just on the victims to adapt, to bring about the right results. This challenge needs serious thinking on several questions. For instance, will literacy in the NALs be rewarding unless their speakers could also use them in the socio-economic world in which they evolve from day to day? Is it possible to develop businesses in which fluency in the NALs is a rewarding asset? In what way could the present socio-economic and ethnographic ecologies be modified to accommodate the Native Americans without creating social and political upheavals and without having the Native Americans carry the burden alone to the satisfaction of concerned linguists? Is the linguistic situation we face different from that faced by environmentalists in regard to vanishing species and changing ecologies? Should the solutions we prescribe be that different in style from those advocated by environmentalists?

I claimed at the outset of this paper that the languages now spoken by descendants of Africans in the New World, most of them characterized as creoles or semi-creoles, are generally not equally endangered. Two questions arise from this claim: first, is the claim true? Second, if it is true, why are these language varieties not equally suffering from attrition (demographic or structural)? After all, we know they are stigmatized.

Starting with the first question, there have been several misconceptions regarding the development of varieties spoken by descendants of Africans. It is not clear how quickly the African languages which were strongly represented in the New World faded away. However, history suggests that the earliest slaves were well integrated in the farms and trade posts in which they were used, although they were maintained in low status. The earliest Africans and especially the creoles--when the Africans were small minorities within the founder populations and before segregation was institutionalized--spoke varieties which were close to those spoken by their European masters or cohorts in servitude. That is, Europeans and Africans then spoke similar language varieties. It is mostly after the economic switch to the large plantation systems, growing rice or sugar cane, and after segregation was institutionalized (within fifty years of the beginnings of the colonies) that white and black speech varieties started to diverge significantly. The reason is clear: even if the starting points of these varieties were similar, their speakers established separate speech communities subject to additional influences from African languages in the black communities and reduced or discontinued such influence in other communities. The language varieties now known as (semi-)creoles developed during this second phase of colonial history.

Since then, in especially North America, white and black communities have developed separately and have produced different cultures and different linguistic norms. The more segregated the communities have been, the more widely different their language varieties have grown. At no time may the process called "decreolization" have taken place in the sense that a creole language variety would have moved farther and farther away from a erstwhile putatively homogeneous basilect, or closer and closer to the acrolect or the lexifier. Ethnographically and structurally, the varieties developed by the descendants of Africans have their counterparts in nonstandard varieties spoken by descendants of Europeans, which are also by-products of population contacts. None of these has moved closer to their standard counterparts either, despite claims by Johnson (1930:11) that "white speech has undergone some degree of change, moving a little nearer, perhaps, toward a standard American English." The economically more successful among speakers of such nonstandard varieties have simply learned to code-switch. In the context of this essay, whenever the lexifiers are the same, speakers of all the new varieties believe they speak the same language, however stigmatized or disfranchised their particular variety may be. This is true of all varieties of African-American English (including Gullah), whose speakers are often shocked when a special name is used to identify their varieties.

Pressure for code-switching is thus not the same among descendants of Africans as among Native Americans who have not been assimilated to the dominant forms of American cultures. In the case of, for instance, North America, obtaining a job outside the reservation requires English, getting education requires English, reading the paper requires English, watching TV requires English (or Spanish in some metropolitan areas), and a host of other things. It is like there is no life without English (or Spanish) outside the reservation!

Although little economic success is guaranteed to an African American who is not fluent in standard English, only minimal literacy in what is considered their own language is required to read the paper, only minimal exposure to educated white colloquial speech is needed to understand programs on TV and watch movies, and not much special linguistic training is required to do several blue-collar jobs. In other words, one can function in the North American socio-economic machine speaking only one of the nonstandard varieties of English, including those of African-American English. As stigmatized as several nonstandard varieties of English are, the structural similarities among them and between them and standard English which permit their speakers to function in the North American economic machine just do not obtain between them and the NALs. Knowing what a reservation has to offer, if you were a Native American wanting economically better for your life, would you make different linguistic choices from most Native American youngsters? If you were an average Native American under the same circumstances, how much interest would you have in your ethnic language?

I say all this not to discourage those fighting for the preservation of Native American languages, but to invite them to put the endangerment of these languages in the right ecological perspective and address the question with strategies which will make it convincing for Native Americans to learn and use their languages in ecologically sounder ways than academic curiosities. It is rare that lessons for the rest of world have to be learned from Africa. However, here, long after it became politically independent, it is often the Africans from the lowest socio-economic class who are opposed to education in their own languages, because they see no point in providing education to their children in languages which promise no access to power nor socio-economic success. In the United States, it is African Americans who are opposed to education in African-American English, fearing that their children maybe more firmly barred from success in a society which requires some fluency in white middle-class English for success, regardless of what one speaks at home.

Putting things in a historical perspective, the Native American linguistic situation is closer to that of the African situation than may be suspected. The languages are unrelated structurally and genetically. Unlike the African-American youngster who can still follow most TV programs and thinks they can communicate, albeit with variable degrees of success, with the rest of the English-speaking world, the Native American youngster who speaks only a NAL could not at a11. For the African-American the problem may be interpreted as having to learn the right dialect for the right context, but for the Native American it is a matter of having to decide about acquiring two different languages, one of which you cannot do much with outside the reservation context.

In other words, the present plight of NALs is an adaptive response to changing ecological conditions. Helping these languages survive requires not insisting on Native Americans developing more pride in their languages but undertaking actions which provide ecological conditions which favor their preservation. Linguists' prescriptions would be more practical if they incorporated these ecological dimensions of the problem.

Chaudenson, Robert. 1992. Des îles, des hommes, des langues: langues créoles-cultures créoles. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Crosby, Alfred W. 1992. Ills. In Atlantic American societies: From Columbus through abolition 1492-1888, ed. By Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, 19-39. London: Routledge.

Dorian, Nancy C. 1983. Natural second language acquisition from the perspective of the study of language death. In Pidginization and creolization as second language acquisition, ed. by Roger Andersen, 158-67. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Giles, Howard. 1979. Ethnicity markers in speech. In Social markers in speech, ed. by Klaus

R. Scherer and Howard Giles, 251-289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goddard, Ives. 1978. Eastern Algonquian languages. In Handbook of North American Indians; vol . 14: Northeast, ed. by Bruce G. Trigger, 70-77. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

Hale, Ken. 1992. On endangered languages and safeguarding diversity. Language 68.1-3.

Johnson, Guy. 1930. Folk culture on St. Helena Island: South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Krauss, Michael. 1992. The world's languages in crisis. Language 68.4-10.

Ladefoged, Peter. 1992. Another view of endangered languages. Language 68.809-81 1.

Laitin, David D. 1992. Language repertoires and states in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1994. Theoretical linguistics and variation analysis: Strange bedfellows? In Papers from the Parasession on Language Variation and Linguistic Theory, ed. by Katie Beals et al. Chicago Linguistic Society.

_________. 1995. Jargons, pidgins, creoles, and koinés: What are they? In Pidgins and creoles: Structures and status, ed. by Arthur Spears and Donald Winford. John Benjamins.

Schleicher, August. 1863. Die darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft: Offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Dr. Ernst Häckel. Weimar: Böhlau.

Watahomigie, Lucille J. and Akira Y. Yamamoto. 1992. Local reactions to perceived language decline. Language 68.10-17.

Woodbury, Anthony C. 1993. A defense of the proposition, 'When a language dies, a culture dies,' In Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium on Language and Society. Texas Linguistic Forum 33. Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin.