Opinion: Helping the Tongva people revive their own language

As Los Angeles fourth-graders know (because their curriculum includes the study of California Indians), the original language of Los Angeles is Tongva. This American Indian language (also called Gabrielino) used to be spoken in villages all over the Los Angeles basin and, in a related dialect, throughout most of the San Fernando Valley.

These villages have given their names to places across Los Angeles, including Tujunga (from Tongva “tuhuunga,” or “place of the old woman”) and Cahuenga (from “kawee’nga,” or “place of the fox”). Some names don’t have translations we know of, such as Topanga (in Tongva, “topaa’nga”). But despite these ever-present reminders, the language has not been spoken for over 50 years. Some people thus might call Tongva “extinct,” but that word is hurtful to Tongva people who would like to see their language awakened once more.

I first encountered Tongva shortly after I began teaching at UCLA 40 years ago, when my mentor, the late professor William Bright, introduced me to the field notes of J. P. Harrington, an ethnographer and linguist who worked with Tongva speakers during the early 20th century.

It’s hard to find information on Tongva. There are no audio recordings of people speaking the language, and there are just a few scratchy wax cylinder recordings of Tongva songs. There are additional word lists from scholars, explorers and others dating from 1838 to 1903, but Harrington’s notes are the best source of information on the language. These records are often inconsistent and maddeningly incomplete, however — it takes a lot of analysis to make sense of them and synthesize them into a clear picture of the language.