Residents of the Mariana Islands are pushing to revive their indigenous language amid fears it might soon die out
Bertilia Yamasta moves a pointer across letters of the alphabet decorating the wall of her classroom. She’s standing before more than a dozen kindergarten students dressed in green-collared shirts who squirm on the carpet as she leads them in familiar recitations.
“A, Ã¥, b, ch, d,” the group says, calling out the alphabet backwards and forwards.
The students are speaking in CHamoru, the indigenous language of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific. And they’re among a shrinking number of people in the Marianas who actually know their ancestral tongue.
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OQ0cSF
