B.A. Van Sise was driving his young nephew to the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, several years ago when he heard Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on the radio. The Moana actor was reflecting on his Samoan heritage. For years he had a hole in his heart, he said, because he didn’t speak the language of his maternal ancestors.

“I suddenly had this moment of epiphany,” Van Sise recalled.

Since graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2005, Van Sise has worked as a photojournalist, artist, and author, but he studied linguistics at the University, and his degree is in both visual arts and modern languages. He took courses in Italian and Russian, and he also speaks French, German, and Ladino, an endangered language he learned from his mother and maternal grandfather growing up in New York.

“I realized I wanted to explore language in America,” he said. “​​What does American language look like?”

It’s more diverse than you might think.

The Resilience of America’s Endangered Languages

English has been dominant on the North American continent for centuries, subsuming other languages, “turning them upside down and shaking their pockets for loose vocabulary,” Van Sise said. And yet, “against unspeakable odds”—despite colonial forces, disease, cultural displacement, migration, and remixing—hundreds of Indigenous and diasporic languages exist in America.

Much of these languages’ variety and complexity is on brilliant display in Van Sise’s latest book, On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues, and in a solo exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through March 2.

The book features speakers, learners, and revitalizers of more than 70 languages in the United States. From Afro-Seminole Creole to Zuni, each language featured includes a brief cultural summary. And each portrait is paired with a single, often hard-to-translate word designed to inspire Van Sise’s visual approach and “show off the poetry inherent in each language,” he said. “Fundamentally, it is not an ethnicity project. It’s about the poetry of languages.”

In that sense, it’s a sequel of sorts to Van Sise’s first book, Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry (2019), and it bears a kinship to his portraits and essays about Holocaust survivors in Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust (2023). Like Holocaust survivors he met, endangered language speakers and revitalizers are “obsessed with the future,” Van Sise said, “the future of their stories, their legacies, their own families, and the people who come after them.”

Van Sise initially thought he might photograph “the last speakers” of various languages, “a really colonialist idea that I’m slightly embarrassed of,” he said. But he ultimately focused on the many people and groups working to revitalize—and in some cases resurrect—these languages. He traveled to 48 states with pivotal support from the Philip and Edith Leonian Trust, he said, and worked with dozens of Indigenous and diasporic cultural organizations, Native tribes and nations, and the Tribal Trust Foundation.

And while he photographed a Bukhari speaker and a Judeo-Spanish singer in his hometown of New York City, most locations weren’t so easy to reach. “Endangered languages really do best in places that are remote and where communities can still speak to each other,” he said.

Striving for Balance

Laura Tohe, former poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, met Van Sise near the Superstition Mountains, two hours east of Phoenix. She had a turquoise dress made specifically for the photo session, and “God gave me the sky” to match, Van Sise said. His playful sense of humor is on display in the way he and Tohe depicted hózhó, or striving for balance, “an extremely famous concept in Diné,” the Navajo language, he said.

Whimsy is also evident in Van Sise’s portrait of former Houma chief Kirby Verret in Gibson, Louisiana. Verret and an alligator teamed up to show off the Houma French word onirique, or something that comes from a dream.

Van Sise spent nearly a week with Amish community member Sylvan Esh before Esh agreed to work with Van Sise on the photograph. Part of getting to know Esh included waking up at 4 a.m. several days in a row to milk his cows, Van Sise said. The Pennsylvania Dutch concept he ultimately depicted with Esh, dæafe, or to have permission to do something, is “extremely, unbelievably important in the culture,” Van Sise said.

A Movement to Revive Lost Languages

Amber Hayward, a member of the Puyallup tribe in Tacoma, Washington, chose the Lushootseed word ʔux̌ʷəlč, or the sound of saltwater waves washing onto the beach. Lushootseed once numbered 12,000 speakers along the Puget Sound “before going extinct approximately twenty years ago,” Van Sise writes. As director of the Puyallup language program, Hayward has aided its rebirth. It’s just one of several languages featured in the book that boast healthy revitalization programs.

Another is the Kalispel language, represented by Jessie Isadore. She recommended the word cn̓paʔqcín, or the dawn comes toward me, said Van Sise, who explained that Kalispel is one of several languages historically spoken in what is now Montana and Washington state that make no distinction between nouns and verbs. “The whole thing just becomes one idea,” he said. “There’s something really lovely about that.”

Nahuatl is one of few languages highlighted in the book that is not spoken primarily in the U.S., but Van Sise could not resist the Aztec language’s centuries-old tradition of making as big a poem as possible with a single compound word. He and Los Angeles–based folkloric dancer Citlali Arvizu (pictured at the top of the story) chose tixochicitlalcuecuepocatimani, or, you are bursting into bloom all over with stars like flowers.

Working with people like Arvizu to create “visual poems” in these languages is more than an artful way to document linguistic diversity. For Van Sise, the goal is to raise awareness and inspire further education and preservation.

“I can’t do much to make the Haida language revitalization program more robust,” he said, picking just one example. “But I can provide the sizzle for the steak.”

8 Uncommon Words to Spark Your Interest in Endangered Languages

B.A. Van Sise’s book On the National Language features conceptual portraits of more than 70 speakers, learners, and revitalizers of endangered languages in the U.S. Each image is inspired by a single word in the speaker’s language, one that isn’t always so easy to translate into English. He hopes readers might “find one impossible word, and want to learn another and another.” Here are eight.

tekariho:ken
between two worlds
Mohawk

kapará
worse things have happened
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino

puppyshow
showing off behavior
Afro-Seminole Creole

amonati
something you hold and keep safe for others
Bukhari

koyaanisqatsi
nature out of balance
Hopi

ma’goddai
feeling when the blood rises that makes you act both violently and lovingly
Chamorro

opyêninetêhi
my heart is taking its time
Sauk

uŋkupelo
we are coming home
Lakota

“They’re writing for the academic audience, but what about us high school students?” asked Suvanni Oates, a high schooler from Bronxdale High School who is an intern for the project. “What about us students who can’t receive that message that they’re trying to send in that way?” 

From June 14 through 16, Fordham welcomed 12 scholar-authors from multiple universities alongside local New York City high school students and Fordham undergraduates for a writing workshop where they could all learn from each other. 

Creating New Articles—and TikTok Videos

“High school students were introduced to undergraduates [and they are]working with linguistic anthropologists, our authors. We prepared student teams to each read one author’s paper and give feedback on what they understood, what they didn’t understand, what spoke to them,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Fordham and founding director of both the Demystifying Language Project and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, which is launching next year. 

During the workshop, held at the Lincoln Center campus, teams of undergrads and high school students worked with their author to “transpose” previously published articles into two-page digital pieces in language teens can understand. Students even spent a day making TikToks that conveyed the main messages of the articles.

“To hear [the authors’]perspective and actually work with them in person, that was the cool part,” said one of the Bronxdale high schoolers, Athalia McCormack.

The resulting 12 papers will be published as a multimedia open educational resource on the website for Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology.

“Our long-term goals include housing these 12 digital pieces on an interactive website that will be free to use,” said Fader. “We hope that this is going to be a resource for high school teachers to use in existing curricula and also for high school students to experiment with social science, especially linguistic anthropology, which is not part of most curricula in NYC public schools.” 

Fordham Students See the Impact

Sitara Vaidy, who graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in May with a psychology and sociology major, was one of the Fordham students working on the project. She said the workshop “allowed the high school students to better understand the significance of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc., and the interesting and important work that they produce.”

Theater and anthropology major Ashira Fischer-Wachspress, FCLC ’23, who also worked with the teams, said she appreciated the justice aspect of the work.

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to have met so many fascinating, driven people working for social justice,” she said. 

Expanding into Communities

The DLP is also planning to use the short articles in a summer institute for high school students, where they will study language and power in their own communities. The following summer they plan to host a teacher-training institute. 

“By demystifying students’ own experiences with language, the DLP strives to create a grounded, hands-on, potentially life-changing set of social justice tools for high school students and teachers and the faculty and undergraduates who collaborate with them,” Fader said.  

The DLP has been externally supported by a Spencer Conference Grant and a Wenner-Gren Workshop Grant. Internal support comes from an Arts and Sciences Dean’s Challenge Grant and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who hosted the pilot project in 2019, and will be collaborating on future programs. Fordham members of the organizing committee include Johanna Quinn, Ph.D. (sociology); Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D. (MLL); and Crystal Colombini, Ph.D. (the Writing Center), who were joined by Mike Mena, Ph.D. (Brooklyn College); Justin Coles, Ph.D. (UMass); Lynnette Arnold, Ph.D. (UMass); Bambi Schieffelin, Ph.D. (NYU), and high school teacher Scott Storm (Harvest Collegiate). 

“Academic writing is often inaccessible to the people whom the findings most affect, especially young people of color in public high schools,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., project collaborator and professor of anthropology at Fordham. “We hope that this workshop gives students access to scholarship on language and inequality and the ability to reflect on how these subjects affect their own lives, while showing them what college life and careers in linguistic anthropology look like.” 

This new writing initiative, the Demystifying Language Project (DLP), began with a three-week pilot class in 2019. In collaboration with Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, two non-Fordham graduate students taught high school students a class on linguistic anthropology, which included simplified academic readings. But at the end of the pilot session, the DLP team realized the teaching material was still too dense and incomprehensible for the students. 

“This is tragic because high school students are losing the potential to better understand the ways that language, culture, and power work in the world,” said Fader, a linguistic anthropologist who studies the relationship between language, culture, and inequality. “During the pandemic, the DLP team decided to focus on creating a set of readings that are accessible to all high school students.” 

Fader is collaborating with five other scholars: Sarah Grey, Ph.D., director of Fordham’s linguistics program; Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D, assistant professor of linguistics and Chinese at Fordham; Johanna Quinn, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Fordham; Clarence Ball III, a lecturer in Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business; and Lynnette Arnold, Ph.D., an assistant professor of anthropology at University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Together, they decided to create a three-day workshop, funded by the grant, where traditional roles in the classroom are reversed. Next year, a group of 12 experts in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics will each select an article they have already published—on topics that are relevant to the students, including police violence, food insecurity, and other inequalities—and work with the students to make the writing more engaging for their high school peers. First, each expert will be paired with a high school student and a Fordham undergraduate who has taken an anthropology or linguistics class; they will review the original article and interview the expert about their work. Then after collaboration with other professionals, each expert will figure out how to distill their work into two pages of simple and interesting prose for a high school student. 

“Students will ask the academics about what was interesting and what they didn’t understand, and tell them the most important part about the article from their eyes,” Fader said. “We hope this develops a new way of writing that reaches more people beyond the usual academic audience.” 

The revised articles will be published on the American Anthropological Association’s website, where students, teachers, and faculty from other academic institutions can read the material and learn how to integrate it into their own curriculum, said Fader. In addition, the DLP team will publish two pieces: an academic article that documents what it was like to develop and host the workshop and an op-ed that explains their experience in conversational language. 

In the months ahead, the DLP team will focus on strengthening relationships with local public high schools in Manhattan and the Bronx. This spring, they will select specific schools to partner with. They will cultivate bonds among all participants so that when the day of the workshop arrives—sometime next year, though the date has yet to be determined—the participants will be ready to collaborate on Fordham’s campus.

“We are potentially creating a set of tools to help high school students make positive changes in their own lives,” said Fader, adding that the DLP team wants to eventually develop a summer institute where more high school students and teachers can learn these same ideas. “This workshop is not only good for students, but also has the potential to transform the field of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics as more students—both undergrads and high school students—conduct their own research and hopefully become interested in the field.” 

But how does hearing diverse languages affect language comprehension and processing?

In her new research, “Foreign-accented Speaker Identity Affects Neural Correlates of Language Comprehension” published in the May 2017 Journal of Neurolinguistics, Sarah Grey, Ph.D., found that a listener’s ability to identify foreign-accented speech affects their brain’s grammatical and semantic processing.

“In our daily lives, we’re interacting with people who are potential non-native speakers of a language, but we don’t have a lot of knowledge about how native speakers are processing what they hear,” said Grey, an assistant professor of linguistics and Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

The study that Grey conducted with Janet G. Van Hell, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and linguistics at Pennsylvania State University, examined the brain activity of 29 monolingual native English-speaking college students living in central Pennsylvania, where English is mostly spoken. None of the participants were currently studying a foreign language and all of them reported limited experience hearing foreign-accented speech.

In the study, participants were told that they were going to be hearing two people talk about their friends’ lives. The task was to listen to sentences related to their discussion. They were not told that the sentences were going to be spoken by a native English speaker and a non-native Chinese-accented speaker, and there was no prior mention of foreign accents, grammar, or semantics.

Some of the pre-recorded declarative sentences, which were delivered by two female speakers, were grammatically and semantically correct. However, other sentences had a grammatical error in English subject pronouns (“Thomas was planning to attend the meeting, but she missed the bus to the school”) or a semantic error (“Kaitlyn traveled across the ocean in a cactus to attend the conference.”)

The researchers examined how the participants processed native and foreign-accented sentences through two methods: First, the neurocognitive technique of event-related potentials (ERPs), which are acquired with electroencephalogram, or EEG data. This allowed them to measure the electrical activity of the brain as listeners were processing the sentences they heard.

“One of the advantages of EEG is that you’re getting a closer look at brain processing in real time,” said Grey. “That’s a very fine level of detail that we don’t always get when we’re looking exclusively at behavioral data.”

Secondly, researchers measured sentence comprehension, language attitudes, and accent perception among the 29 listeners being tested.

The results from Grey’s study showed that being able to recognize foreign-accented speech seems to affect not only semantic processing, but also aspects of processing grammar. Both groups of listeners showed reduced semantic processing of foreign-accented speech compared to native-accented speech. However, for processing the grammar, the patterns of the two groups of listeners differed, she said.

“Listeners who could successfully identify foreign-accented speech had more active brain responses during grammar processing than the listeners who couldn’t identify the accent,” said Grey.

 A global reality

As the United States continues to grow as a culture where many different languages are spoken and heard, Grey said her research on language comprehension is providing a deeper understanding of how bilinguals and monolinguals process the language around them.  According to Grey, these changes are also reflective of a global reality.

She said she doesn’t have to look much further than the Bronx to see the impacts of multilingualism. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey, 60.1 percent of Bronx residents speak a language other than English.

“Fordham is located in a linguistically rich area, which is incredibly attractive [for my research],” she said.

Most recently, Grey set up an EEG laboratory for Language and Multilingualism Research at the Rose Hill campus to conduct more experiments on language learning and comprehension— with the first set of data collection planned for later this year.

“We’d like to continue to look at language processing in groups of bilinguals to see if their own statuses as bilingual speakers also impact their brain responses,” she said.

Challenging misconceptions

Through her research on language processing, Grey hopes to also challenge misconceptions about foreign-accented speech.

“Oftentimes hearing foreign accentedness, or even dialectic accentedness, brings up a preconceived set of biases,” she said. “People often assume that the person may not be a high proficiency speaker of the language, may be brand new to a language, or that they may have ideological differences.”

Grey’s own experiences learning Spanish as a native English-speaking high school student, and later at the undergraduate level, provided her with a well-rounded perspective on language learning and comprehension, she said.

“It was through my own foreign language experience that I got interested in the more technical aspects of language study related to linguistics,” she said. “And I just followed that to where I’m at now.”

Grey plans to use Fordham’s EEG laboratory for Language and Multilingualism Research as a gateway for students to learn how multilingualism is transforming not only the world, but the Bronx community in which the Rose Hill campus is based.

“Most people around the world are bilingual or multilingual, or live in a context where bilingualism and multiculturalism are a daily reality,” she said.

“[The lab] gives students a different view of language learning and comprehension because we’re using neuroscience methods to examine foreign language learning and bilingual language processing. That’s kind of a novel way to think about [the study of]modern languages.”