Trip of the Tongue Read Online Free

found Norwegian in North Dakota, Spanish in the Southwest, and creoles in Louisiana and Georgia. I learned about Crow, Navajo, and Makah. I picked up my first words of Haitian Creole on the streets of Miami, and I struggled with Basque spelling in a dusty corner of Nevada.
    This book is not a comprehensive outline of the history of language in America or an exhaustive catalog of the country’s heritage-language communities. It isn’t even an unabridged record of my travels. The fact is, despite my preparation and enthusiasm, my expeditions weren’t always successful. Sometimes I’d visit a city or a town and find only the vaguest hint of the language in question. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to see or do. Sometimes no one would talk to me. On one occasion my plans were foiled by severe winter weather and on another by my friend Damian, who kept finding ways to convince me to go out drinking. But, in the end, I learned far more than I’d anticipated.
    What follows are my accounts of the people, places, and languages that were the most interesting, the most revealing, and the most surprising. Together they tell a story of conflict and kinship, marginalization and assimilation, and, ultimately, one part of what it means to be American.
    * The Lenape are also frequently referred to as the Delaware Indians.
    * Eagle-eyed New Yorkers may have wondered why the official spelling of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has one fewer z than its namesake. This is not exactly a misspelling, but a choice: Giovanni da Verrazzano was born, lived, and died in France, and accordingly he adopted and used in public the French version of his name, Jean de Verrazano.

Chapter One
    Montana: Crow
    The first place I’m going to tell you about is Montana. This might seem a strange place to start, particularly given that I didn’t make my way there until midway through my travels. But it was in Montana that I began to get to know the diverse group of languages and cultures that have been in America the longest. And, therefore, it was in Montana that I began to lay the groundwork for my understanding of everything that came after.
    Going into my research, this first group of languages—the languages of Native America—was without a doubt the group of American languages I was least familiar with. I like to think I had a fairly liberal education, but as a child I was exposed to only the barest minimum about the people and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of European explorers, colonists, and conquerors. Much like millions of other American schoolchildren, I learned about the first Thanksgiving, the construction of tipis, and, of course, the way that the Indian appreciated the earth and therefore honored each and every last piece of the buffalo. The only notable difference in my experience was, perhaps, my proximity to and therefore slight familiarity with the Cahokia Mounds.
    Not that I could tell you very much about the Cahokia Mounds, apart from the fact that they are, indeed, quite moundy.
    The languages of Native America were also the languages I found most intimidating. I’d read a few pages here and there about Algonquin noun class or the Cherokee syllabary, but only as part of my general fetish for linguistic novelty. I had never stopped to consider the broader scope of Native languages, either in terms of linguistic complexity or in terms of their role in American history and culture.
    So five years ago languages such as Crow or Navajo—much less Lushootseed, Quileute, or Makah—would have primarily inspired in me an intellectual trepidation. I was, you see, afraid to discover just how much I didn’t know. As Douglas Adams once wrote, “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.” Once I opened my eyes to the vast landscape of indigenous American languages, I feared I would have to acknowledge just how microscopic the