Losing Our Native Language (A Brief Look)

By Lewis Martin

A lot of people in my Community of Kwigillingok, located in the southwest region outside of Bethel– we grew up only speaking in Yugtun. When I first started going to school, I did not know a single word in English. It took me a while to learn the language, and I did not enjoy every bit of learning in English. I did not do well when English teachers began teaching us. My reading and writing were not there even though the words were easy. A lot of my classmates and I started school from Pre-K. The older generation did not have any preschool or kindergarten. They started with first grade when they were at the age of six years.

Growing up, after we learned how to speak English, my parents would remind me not to speak English. We would get in trouble or yelled at when we didn’t speak Yugtun. I would get slapped in the mouth by my mom, and I would be told to sit down, and my grandmother would talk to me gently and calmly to remind me to speak only Yugtun.

Today, the younger generation’s first language is English, and they cannot speak the Yugtun Language, but they will understand if we speak to them. My nephew is one of the people whose first language is English, and my family and I speak to him in Yugtun a lot and slowly he is making progress in learning to speak the language.