ANOTHER Red Indian language was buried yesterday, with the funeral in Massachusetts of Red Thunder Cloud. Mr Thunder Cloud, a 76-year-old storyteller who died at the weekend, was the last person to speak the tongue of the Catawba tribe.

Linguists say it will not be the last such language to disappear. The rate of obliteration is accelerating since many of the remaining Red Indian languages are now spoken chiefly by the middle-aged or elderly, their children preferring the native tongue of Hollywood and computer games.

Despite federal-funded drives and efforts by individual tribes to run summer language camps, the linguistic colonisation of North America, aided by the English-speaking media, is practically complete.

"It is desperately sad, and there is a lot of concern," said Professor Kathleen Bragdon of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. However, with 78 languages extinct and another 68 endangered, the future does not look good. Only 26 are categorised as "vigorous". These include Navajo, which has some 130,000 speakers in the New Mexico area, and Ojibwa, spoken by 35,000 in Michigan and Canada.

The languages listed as endangered range from Passamaquoddy, in Maine, which has 1,500 speakers, to Luiseno, spoken by as few as 100 people in California, and the Wisconsin-based Menomini, understood by no more than 50.

The complexity of Indian languages has not helped attempts to save them. "They are highly inflected, rather like Latin, and it is possible to be very exact with economy," Professor Bragdon said.

There are seven major language families, but there are enormous differences within them and Indians from different regions in the old times could not necessarily comprehend one another. The brand of Algonquin in which Powahatan greeted English settlers at the James River in 1607 has gone the way of Catawba, but snatches of some other languages remain ­ fragmented phrases which descendants continue to use in daily speech.

Professor Bragdon said that records of some of the extinct languages were made before their last speakers died, "but it is a huge leap to go from that, or from written accounts of the language, to reviving a forgotten tongue". Red Thunder Cloud made oral recordings of Catawba before he died, along with Catawba songs.

We also know the words he would utter to his dog: "Swie hay, tanty" (tr. "move, hound!"). The animal always seemed to understand.

Last speakers of ancient languages suffer almost unimaginable despair. "They have a terrible sense of isolation, with no one else to talk to, and a realisation that they are the last keepers of an historic language," Professor Bragdon said.

Loren Bommelyn said that as a child he realised that he was going to be one of the last to be fluent in the Tolowa tongue of his forefathers. "In my mind I saw a big, heavy, stone door, and it was closing real slowly," he said. "It had only two or three inches to be shut on the language."

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