Immersion key to language revitilization

By Jami Custer
Staff Writer

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. – With only an estimated 6,500 fluent Cherokee speakers left, Cherokee Nation officials say the most effective tool they have to keep the language from dying is the immersion program.

Principal Chief Chad Smith said the only way to keep the Cherokee language alive is to completely immerse one’s self in the language. He also said building more immersion schools is necessary because at the current rate the tribe is losing more speakers than it is producing.

“Hardly anybody under 50 speaks Cherokee. So if you go back 50 years what happened?” Smith said. “The language took a nosedive practically.”

To become fluent, one has to continually exercise the language, and the only way to do that is in an immersion program, Smith said.

“The immersion kids have done very well,” he said.

He said immersion schools are the best success at graduating fluent speakers, and that all the students are fluent and become fluent within four or five months.

“There are nearly 70 students in the immersion program up to third grade and Cherokee Nation adds a grade every year,” Smith said. “They are all fluent and some of them are literate.”

The Language Immersion Program will add a fourth grade class in August, maintaining the promise to add a grade each year until students can enter Sequoyah Schools as a seventh grade student.

“We’ll be adding a fourth grade in August,” Samantha Benn-Duke, senior director of Culture and Language, said. “We’re very excited about that.”

Benn-Duke has been in her position since June and has seen progress in the nine months with the LIP, which has an enrollment of 64 students. The third grade class has nine students, all of which Benn-Duke anticipates being in the fourth grade class in August.

Immersion officials have said that adding grades each year is needed because when children leave the immersion program and enter public schools they forget what Cherokee they learned.

Smith said the tribe promotes preserving the language through several other outlets.
“We have got youth choir, online classes, community classes, university classes, public school classes, interactive games, internet, print, audio and video,” he said.

He added that programs within public schools would also help to continue to produce more speakers.

Smith said it would take more than 20 years, but his hope was that every child becomes fluent and literate in the language.