Linguistics professor documents endangered Menominee language

A one-way drive from Madison to the Menominee reservation at Keshena takes more than three hours. At the end of an arduous week, Monica Macaulay often wonders how she will muster the energy for the trip.

“Then I get up there and it’s wonderful,” she says. “Going to the reservation has become my recreation as well as my work.”

The aforementioned work involves learning from tribal elders the intricacies of the rapidly vanishing Menominee language. In turn, Macaulay, professor of linguistics and chair of the department, is recording and documenting a traditionally oral language markedly different from any European counterpart.

While community service like this has made its way into — and out of — classrooms of virtually every discipline, incorporating service into the very fabric of field research is a much less common phenomenon. Language preservation is a remarkably fertile service field for researchers; scholars estimate that between 50 and 90 percent of the world’s languages will disappear in the course of the present century. One of them could be Menominee.

The Menominee are making some progress toward keeping their Algonquian language alive and flourishing. “It’s being taught in all the schools and two colleges on the reservation. There also are six adult learners in an intensive program,” Macaulay says. “One of the graduate students who’s working with me up there, Christine Lemley, is in curriculum and instruction, specializing in second-language teaching. She helps the Menominee teachers come up with the most effective teaching strategies for different learning levels.”

Meanwhile, Macaulay and the other graduate student on the project, Marianne Milligan, are in the process of making a video about a traditional story recounting the origins of the ceremonial jingle dress.

“One video will have both audio and subtitles in Menominee, for advanced learners, and one will have subtitles in English, for beginners,” Macaulay says.

Although the disparities between English and Menominee make translations and learning difficult, the contrasts fascinate Macaulay. Her specialty, formally known as morphology, is the study of the structure and formation of a language. Indeed, a love of language claimed Macaulay quickly in her life. By the age of 10, she could beat her mother in games of Scrabble.

“She was good at it, too,” she says. “My mother was an attorney and social psychologist, and my dad (Stewart Macaulay) is a contracts law professor here,” she says.

While her appreciation for and interest in words was established easily, Macaulay found herself adrift in graduate school, wondering precisely which direction to take. That she came to indigenous American languages was the purest of accidents, she says.

“At the University of California-Berkeley, I had the opportunity to work with a speaker of Mixtec, an indigenous language of Mexico, and I started working with that,” she says. Her research culminated in the first dictionary of Chalcatongo, a Mixtec dialect used by the speaker with whom she worked.

However, once Macaulay got her Ph.D. and accepted a job at Purdue University in Indiana, she discovered that continuing with Mixtec would pose significant logistical challenges.

“It was simply too difficult to travel to California and Mexico for fieldwork,” she says. Her move to UW–Madison in 1996 helped her fix her studies on Menominee. In 1998, Ada Deer, director of UW–Madison’s American Indian Studies program, introduced Macaulay to elders and other members of the community at the Menominee reservation in northeastern Wisconsin.

“It’s been such a delight to get to know the people up there,” Macaulay says. “The stories I hear are quite amazing. Sarah Skubitz, one of the women who told us about the origin of the jingle dress, often talks about how it was to travel from place to place by horse and buggy. Yes, you could read those same stories in a book, but hearing them told by a real person makes history come completely alive.”

The next step in documenting the language will be compiling a new dictionary of the Menominee language. Macaulay and Milligan are just embarking on that project, but already they have some ideas about what specific shape it will take.

“We’ll have both a print version and a CD. I think it will be really important to have a CD because it can contain sound files. If the Menominee language does become extinct, the audio component will provide an exact record of pronunciations that just won’t be spoken anymore,” Macaulay says.

The dictionary will be about three years in the making, she figures. No doubt she will fill the time with service projects as well as academic ones.

“When I was in graduate school, giving back to the communities where researchers did fieldwork wasn’t much of a focus,” she says.

“Now I can’t imagine conducting research any other way.”