Chamorro is an Austronesian language spoken by 45,000 people in the unincorporated U.S. territory of Guam and the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Though a living language today, it is clearly endangered. It is also at a critical moment in its history, when improved documentation and heightened community awareness of language endangerment could make a real difference to its survival. With support from the National Science Foundation, one linguist and one Chamorro educator will work with community members to radically upgrade the documentation of the Chamorro language.
Dr. Sandra Chung, a linguist, will write a comprehensive reference grammar of Chamorro intended for Chamorro speakers, linguists, and language learners. Dr. Elizabeth Rechebei, an educator, will oversee a working group of community members who will revise, correct, and expand the 1975 Chamorro-English Dictionary. The oral histories of fluent Chamorro speakers will be videotaped, providing a record of connected Chamorro discourse that is rich in cultural information. The resulting materials will provide a detailed record of the Chamorro language that can be used by the community and by linguists. They will serve as the foundation for the next generation of Chamorro bilingual education materials, and help increase the proportion of Chamorros who are fluent and literate in their own language. In the best case, they will have a positive impact on the language's survival.
The Chamorro language, spoken in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and the U.S. territory of Guam, is one of the most endangered languages of Micronesia. Most fluent speakers of Chamorro are 50 or older, and the language is not being passed down to children. In this collaborative project, teachers, elders, cultural experts, and other Chamorro people in the CNMI worked with a linguist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, to improve the documentation of their language. Over 100 Chamorros on the islands of Rota, Saipan, and Tinian worked in teams to revise the Chamorro-English dictionary. They added new entries and expanded existing entries, adding more accurate definitions, new cultural information, and many illustrative Chamorro sentences. The revised dictionary, which is over 600 pages long and contains over 10,000 entries, is now being edited by three Chamorro editors. Five oral histories in the Chamorro language were collected from elders, videotaped, and edited. These oral histories provide vivid records of Chamorro discourse. In California, the linguist began to write a new comprehensive reference grammar of Chamorro. She also developed an on-line version of the dictionary that enables users to find a Chamorro word successfully even if they are not sure how to spell it. The revised dictionary, the oral histories, and the reference grammar provide a detailed, accessible record of the Chamorro language. This documentation will be useful for future generations of Chamorros as well as scientists interested in the nature of language. This project had broader impacts in the CNMI. The dictionary revision was seen as a community-owned project, and the Chamorro community became fully and wholeheartedly engaged in it. Participants received basic training in computer use. Members of the dictionary team worked with the CNMI’s Language Policy Commission to revise the Chamorro spelling system so that it is easier to use and teach. The new spelling system, which is used in the revised dictionary, led the CNMI’s Public School System to create a new generation of K-12 Chamorro language materials. The dictionary team organized the first Chamorro Language Conference, held on Rota in 2010. This conference brought together students, parents, teachers, elders, and government officials to discuss language endangerment, bilingualism, and other language-related issues. More generally, the project raised community awareness of language issues and the interest of scientific research. Community members discovered that they were deeply concerned about the current state of the Chamorro language and heavily invested in the language’s preservation.
