Coining new words

The Alutiiq New Words Council was featured in a radio story today on Alaska News Nightly. As April Counciller describes in the story, the New Words Council brings together Alutiiq elders in monthly meetings to decide on official words for modern concepts such as 'barista' and 'cafeteria'. The New Words Council is a significant effort at "modernizing" an Alaskan language. Too often Native languages are viewed as relics of the past, associated only with traditional culture. Creating new words will help the language to flourish in a world full of cellphones and digital music players.

Curiously, though, the NWC seems to overlook the most common and natural method for coining new words: namely, borrowing. The new word for 'telivision' is ulutegwik, which means literally 'thing for looking'. In this case the new word is built up from existing Alutiiq words or word parts. This approach makes full use of the underlying structure of the Alutiiq language, but because there is no unique way to create words using this structure, it can take some time for speakers to reach agreement. So it is that many new words require discussion over several meetings of the Council.

An alternative method for creating new words relies on taking a word from another language and adapting the pronunciation to fit the new language. This process of borrowing is actually much more common among the world's languages than might be thought. For example, most of the English words for which the NWC is creating new Alutiiq words are actually borrowings in English. Consider:

restaurant < French
cafeteria < Spanish
tram < Ducth / Low German
ski < Norwegian
barista < Italian

The last of these was borrowed into English quite recently.

Ironically, at one time Alutiiq did rely heavily on borrowing. In fact, among Alaskan languages only Unangax̂ has more borrowed words than Alutiiq. Words for 'table', 'stove', 'tea', etc. were borrowed from Russian and adapted to Alutiiq pronunciation rules. Traces of this former openness to borrowing can even be seen in words produced recently by the NWC. For example, the word for 'barista' is kuufialista, literally 'one who makes coffee'. This is built from the root kuufi, itself a borrowing from Russian (which got the word from Arabic through Turkish).

Too often borrowing is viewed as "contaminating" the language. But such a view presumes a static view of language as a museum piece which can only be manipulated internally. Borrowings enrich languages by providing stimulation from outside sources, allowing them to grow and adapt with ease. English and Alutiiq are much richer as a result of their many borrowings.

Regardless, Alutiiq will surely be much richer and vibrant as a result of the efforts of the New Words Council. Their efforts demonstrate that Native languages need not be restricted to traditional domains such as telling folktales. Rather, Native languages can grow and expand in step with our ever-changing world.