Who's Backing Efforts to Halt the Extinction of Indigenous Languages?

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Alongside the ongoing mass extinction of animal and plant species, another mass extinction event is taking place under our noses, and it’s happening in the realm of human speech. Though we rarely hear about it, an Indigenous language dies every two weeks. 

The death of a language isn’t just a matter of misplacing some nouns and adverbs, or losing the chance to geek out over the creative ways people have come up with to arrange them. On a practical level, native language preservation and revitalization has been found to protect the health of Indigenous people and communities. The death of Indigenous languages also constricts scientists’ ability to study the true capacity of the human mind and deprives us of the medical knowledge contained in the minds and words of those languages’ last speakers.

The death of Indigenous languages is also a moral issue. “Language is a fundamental human right, and we can't deny that to communities just because the forces of globalization and colonialization have not given them a chance,”  said Wil Meya, chairman and CEO of the Language Conservancy.

The United Nations has acknowledged the depth and urgency of the problem, launching the International Decade of Indigenous Languages this past December. But as the U.N. leads global efforts to preserve Indigenous languages, who’s working on the problem here in the U.S., and are philanthropic funders paying attention? 

The answer: not so much. We’ve identified three U.S.-based nonprofit organizations doing significant work on the problem – more on them and their funders in a bit. All of them combined received significantly less than $1 million in philanthropic support in 2021, a level of funding that’s been typical in recent years. 

Why is this work so underfunded?

Part of the problem, no doubt, is a lack of awareness of the issue. Meya, who said that his organization receives roughly 10% of its funding from foundations, told IP that just 25 years ago, the issue of Indigenous language loss was so marginalized that it was difficult to get funders to recognize that the issue was even relevant, or that it mattered at all. There’s more awareness today, Meya said, but “we still have a long way to go.” 

Another challenge may be a perception that saving an Indigenous language is a huge hill to climb. That’s certainly the impression left by a recent Washington Post article outlining the long, labor-intensive process taking place right now in the Amazon between the last woman alive who speaks Iskonawa and a researcher intent on helping her pass her linguistic heritage to future generations. On the other hand, though, Meya said that his organization can now create a dictionary in just 12 months — a process that used to take up to 20 years. 

In other words: Yes, preserving Indigenous languages is difficult work. But it’s also very doable work, particularly with modern technology. And given the low budgets nonprofits in this sector have to work with, and the almost total lack of philanthropic support for their efforts, this is an area where funders have a chance to make a huge, measurable impact on a whole range of issues including the health of Indigenous people, healthcare overall, and Indigenous peoples’ ability to more easily create resilient communities and preserve their art, culture and identity.

“When you think about it, language is at the intersection of so many issues,” Meya said. “It's fundamental to education; it's fundamental to social justice; it's fundamental to women's rights; it's fundamental to climate change and the diversity of ecosystems. It's fundamental to issues of youth, and issues of culture, arts and so many other things. Language is the vehicle of culture and identity. And when language goes,” he went on, it can negatively affect all of those things.

With that in mind, here are three U.S.-based organizations working to preserve Indigenous languages internationally — and the wealth of knowledge, culture and potential they contain. Though they’re received some philanthropic support, the numbers here are very, very low.  

The Language Conservancy: In addition to dictionaries, the Bloomington, Indiana-based TLC produces additional language-learning materials like flash cards and picture books and trains language instructors. Candid lists just five grants for a total of $37,000 to this organization in 2021. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was the largest private philanthropy to support TLC that year. The nonprofit’s entire net assets stood at just over $600,000.

Wikitongues: When National Geographic profiled this group in 2018, Wikitongues had recruited volunteers in 40 countries to record conversations with native speakers and was building an app to allow people to create their own language dictionaries using text, audio and video. The New York-based organization was a comparative darling of private philanthropy in 2021, with $226,000 in grants, but reported net assets of only $51,501 that year. The J.M. Kaplan Fund and Silicon Valley Community Foundation were its lead private funders.

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages: Living Tongues, based in Salem, Oregon, creates “linguist-aided, community-driven multimedia language documentation projects.” President Greg Anderson said that federal grants are the primary source of his organization’s revenue and that the nonprofit also receives public online donations and a very small number of private grants, including anonymous gifts made through Fidelity Charitable. In 2021, Living Tongues reported net assets of just over $225,000.

Other funding for Indigenous language preservation

As Anderson of Living Tongues indicated, the federal government, not private philanthropy, is the primary source of funding to preserve Indigenous languages here in the U.S. As of 2019, there were over 40 federal grants totaling more than $11 million set aside for this purpose. While that far outpaces philanthropic support, it still doesn’t begin to meet the need in this country alone. 

Nor, by the way, does it atone for the many millions the federal government spent over roughly 150 years to willfully extinguish those languages, in frequent partnership with civic sector organizations like churches and religious schools. In that sense, today’s civic sector funders could think of language preservation as a form of reparations, extending resources for Indigenous people to rekindle what was essentially stolen from them.

In addition to the funders mentioned above, another philanthropy-backed player to note is the First Nations Development Institute’s Native Language Immersion Initiative, whose web page says it has awarded 62 grants totaling over $5 million to grow and strengthen 39 Native language immersion programs since its launch in 2017. The regranting initiative recently announced its 2023 cohort of 10 grantees, with current funding from the NoVo and Sunderland foundations. 

Another organization, the funder affinity group International Funders for Indigenous Peoples (IFIP), has 56 members including private, family, corporate and public funders, about half of which are U.S.-based. IFIP is also the home of the Indigenous Led Fund, made up of funding organizations led by Indigenous people. Executive Director Lourdes Inga said that roughly a third of IFIP’s members support projects that involve language preservation and revitalization.  

At the beginning of our interview, TLC’s Meya said that he found his career through the “happy accident” of taking a semester off for a trip during which he ended up spending time in a Mayan-speaking community living in a village in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Today, the Mayan language is no longer being passed down to Mayan children, and is yet another Indigenous language at risk of extinction. 

If massive action isn’t taken starting right now, including by philanthropic funders, Meya told me 90% of the world’s Indigenous languages will disappear in less than 80 years. That loss, Meya said, will cause a “massive shift in the world's cultures that we are not yet really prepared for. And we've not put our mind to that. Maybe it's inevitable in some ways, but we need to at least make sure that these languages have a chance to survive.”