Professor of Linguistics and Vice Chair of Navajo Language Academy Inc. Ted Fernald has made groundbreaking efforts in the implementation and preservation of Navajo linguistics in the modern age. Last fall, he was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). For decades, the NEH has served among the leading funding sources of the humanities in the United States, seeking to educate the public by promoting accessible education.
Fernald received a Documenting Endangered Languages research grant to further study the documentation of endangered languages and syntax. Specifically, the grant will emphasize Fernald’s commitment to the implementation of the Navajo language in Navajo communities through a research-oriented Field School.
He stressed the impact of the grant in his interview with The Phoenix.
“Last summer, my team developed a combination of a lexicon of conjunctions and grammatical descriptions of the syntax of coordination. A drop-down menu on the website allows users to search a database for multiple example sentences containing a particular conjunction,” he said. “Participants in the Field School will build this tool, selecting example sentences, glossing them, and making audio recordings to accompany them. The resulting tool will be useful for language teachers and students, as well as linguists within and outside the Navajo Nation.”
Originally from Ohio, Fernald was first introduced to Navajo language when his father, a pediatrician, began volunteering at a hospital on a Navajo Reservation in the Ganado region of Arizona. While his stay in the Navajo region was not long enough to gain fluency with the language quite yet, Fernald took an interest in learning a language so vastly different from what those in his home state were familiar with. After earning his B.A. in Economics, Fernald later began working with deaf individuals and became familiar with American Sign Language (ASL). Following some formal education in sign languages, Fernald began leaning more towards the field of Linguistics and grammatical structures.
“[Grammar] got me thinking about organizing information in a particular way, using small, meaningful units, words, and sub-parts of words. If you put them together right, it means something else. It means something more precise. And so you build up words, you build up structure that way,” Fernald said.
Fernald would later encounter Navajo language again in graduate school through a large reference on the grammar of Navajo language in his program’s library. He would go on to publish multiple papers on Diné verb structure and gain exposure to the broader community of Navajo linguists by attending a conference. During his arrival on Swarthmore’s campus in the Fall semester of 1994, Linguistics was a program, but not yet a department in and of itself.
“When I came to Swarthmore in fall of ’‘94, it was partly due to my job description – to teach semantics and the structure of a non-Indo-European language. What’s interesting for linguists about a language which Swarthmore students probably haven’t ever encountered before [is that it] just broadens their horizons about the richness of human language,” Fernald told The Phoenix.
In 1996, Linguist Paul Plotero joined Swarthmore’s faculty as the Lang Center’s Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change, with whom Fernald would collaborate to organize a conference consisting of Navajo language activists and linguists, as well as other experts working in related languages. In 1997, the inaugural workshop of what would become the Navajo Language Academy (NLA/Diné Bizaad Naalkaah) convened and was established as a non-profit organization the following year. Since then, the NLA has conducted annual summer workshops in which Navajo language activists and linguists teach the language to adolescents in Navajo communities who may have little to no exposure to Navajo language at home from their parents, grandparents or other ancestral relatives. Otherwise known as the NSF-REU Linguistics Field Schools, the program is a combined effort of the NLA and of Navajo Technical University, and serves to emphasize the language’s unique linguistic structures that may pose difficulties in learning the language beyond adolescence.
“The NLA held (usually) three 3-week long programs for linguists and language teachers every summer since 1997 through 2019. Most of the participants were Navajo language teachers who needed some deeper understanding of grammar for their work,” Fernald said. “NLA would offer courses in linguistics and especially verb structure, which in Navajo is quite complex.”
By the late 2010s, Fernald was looking for a way to invigorate the summer workshops and initiated talking grammar and dictionary projects through NSF funding and the Navajo Technical University.
“Much of the motivation was to create internships for Navajo speakers who had an interest in grammar, so they could get paid for work that used their expertise with the language. At the same time we were producing freely available online resources that we hoped would benefit language learners and language teachers,” Fernald said.
Navajo Field Schools maintain a pivotal role in the preservation of Navajo languages, and may perhaps be indicative of possible methods in maintaining other endangered languages that are often overlooked. They work to ensure connections in the present day continue with ancestral heritage and language. For Professor Fernald, maintaining tradition through language is crucial for understanding history.
“For Navajo people, it’s an ongoing tradition. Songs, stories, prayers don’t sound right in English. There is a slippage of meaning when translation is done. There is a loss of cultural connection for people who don’t know the language. For linguists, Navajo is of great scientific value because of the way the grammar works. For the general American populace, living Indigenous traditions help combat the at least partly-willful forgetfulness that America was fully populated (for at least 13,000 years) before Europeans arrived, took over the place and pretended they were the only ones who wanted to live here. Navajo is the language in the best position to survive the European invasion. It seems that there’s a pretty deliberate erasure of the past. That’s not the case out in the Navajo nation, but it’s important, I think, for American society not to deny its past.”
