In the new movie about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded in 1607, the paramount Indian chief Powhatan asks Captain John Smith where his people came from. The sky?
Responding to the question, translated by an Indian whose smattering of English probably came indirectly from the earlier failed Roanoke colony in North Carolina, Smith replies: "The sky? No. We come from England, an island on the other side of the sea."
The dialogue continues as the interpreter puts Smith's reply in Powhatan's own words, Virginia Algonquian, a language not spoken for more than two centuries. Like most of the 800 or more indigenous languages of North America when Europeans first arrived, Powhatan's became extinct as Indians declined in number, dispersed and lost their cultural identity.
A small but growing number of linguists and anthropologists has been busy in recent years recreating such dead or dying Indian speech. Their field is language revitalization, the science of reconstructing lost languages. One byproduct of the scholarship is the dialogue in Virginia Algonquian for the movie The New World.
More than movie making is behind the research. A revival of ethnic pride and cultural studies has stimulated Indians' interest in their languages, some long dead. Of the more than 15 Algonquian languages in eastern North America, the two still spoken are Passamaquoddy-Malecite in Maine and Mikmaq in New Brunswick.
In other cases, the few speakers of an Indian tongue are the old people, never their grandchildren, and so the research is a desperate attempt to save another language from burial with a departing gener-ation. The passing of a language diminishes cultural diversity, anthropologists say, and the restoration of at least some part of a language is an act of reclaiming a people's heritage.
Blair Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said several Algonquian commun-ities in the East had efforts under way to recover their lost languages and return them to daily use.
"What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some piece of the language because it is reclaiming their heritage," Rudes said. "So much was lost that reclaiming any of it is a major event."
Ives Goddard, a curator for linguistics and anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said, "The loss of languages continues, and it's a worldwide phenomenon."
At least half the world's estimated 6,000 languages, Goddard said, have so few remaining speakers that they are threatened with extinction. By 2100, he predicted, "there will be fewer than 3,000 languages still spoken."
When the director of The New World, Terrence Malick, decided that for authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in Rudes, who has worked with Goddard in reconstructing the defunct Algonquian language of the Pequot of Conne-cticut. He is also engaged in language restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is collaborating with Helen Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, on a dictionary of Virginia Algonquian.
Rudes was asked what would Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas say and how would they say it? It was a daunting assignment.
The related Algonquian languages were among the first in North America to die out, and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. Like other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central America, there was no writing system, and the grammar and most of their vocabulary were lost.
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