But that's not the point, as far as language survival is concerned.
The conference is being sponsored by UC Berkeley's linguistics department and its Survey of California and Other Indian Languages research center and archive, in partnership with the non-profit group Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.
Other First Nations — the Ojibwe, in Minnesota; the Blackfoot, in Montana; the Iñupiat, of northern Alaska — also have nests, and the trend has been gaining momentum since the passage, in 2006, of the Esther Martínez Native American Language Preservation Act, which provided funding for language survival and restoration programs from pre-K through college.
It was at Berkeley that the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (an indigenous nonprofit organization) collaborated with Prof. Leanne Hinton to create the Breath of Life Archival Institute; now in its third decade, this program helps revive dormant languages by recovering archival material for California Indian languages with no or few living first-language speakers.
This week June 3-9-9 — the campus, with the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, is hosting the Breath of Life Institute, a weeklong conference where Native Californians can explore and use the archives of the California Indian languages and materials for their own efforts in language reclamation.
With the help of a stipend received as part of the 2006 Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award, Hinton will continue working after the conference with Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival on a how-to language instruction manual for Indian families in California and across the country to use at home.
But English is not thereby immune to the principles of language survival.
As many as 75percentt of the languages spoken in the territories that became the United States have gone extinct, with slightly better language survival rates in Central and South America, slightly worse survival rates in Australia.
Reclaiming ancestral traditions, the urban poor fashioned new languages of survival.
But Palenqueros, as the community's residents call themselves, say the biggest threat to their language's survival comes from direct contact with outsiders.
