Reviving an Endangered Language

NEH funding supported the production of the Klallam Dictionary. Image courtesy of the University of Washington Press.

With NEH funding, University of North Texas professor Timothy Montler and the Klallam Tribes of Northwest Washington produced the Klallam Dictionary. The six-pound, more than 1,008 page book has played an instrumental role in preserving and revitalizing the Native American language, improving Klallam instruction in local schools and making it possible for the tribes, who live at Elwha, Jamestown, and Port Gamble in Washington and on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, to connect with their heritage.

The Klallam Dictionary, published in 2012, was decades in the making. Montler, who began learning Klallam in 1978, created a writing system for the language and produced educational materials for use in schools during the 1990s. A true community partnership, 38 Klallam elders contributed to the dictionary—one, Adeline Smith, contributed more than 12,000 words. Proceeds from the sale of the Klallam Dictionary helped Montler and the tribes publish the Klallam Grammar in 2015. Both are used in the local school system. In testimony before the U.S. Congress, Jamie Valadez, a Klallam teacher who also worked on the dictionary, reflected that “Having both of these resources in the classroom for students to use daily has had a huge impact [on] student learning. It authenticated our existence and raised up our standard of living or has made our social fabric whole once again.”

Video courtesy of The Seattle Times.

The Klallam program has had measurable impacts on student success. Most Native American students take Klallam courses, and their collective GPA has risen in the years since the dictionary was published. At Port Angeles High School, Native American students scored 10% higher in 2016 than 2015 on the Grade 10 English Language Arts Smarter Balanced Assessment and scored 14% higher than Native students statewide.

Montler has continued his work documenting the endangered languages of ndigenous peoples and received additional NEH funding to document Saanich, a dialect of Salish that is spoken by tribes in British Columbia. In 2018, in partnership with the W̱SÁNEĆ, he published the SENĆOŦEN Dictionary.