Sir

Your News Feature “Tongue tied” (Nature 438, 148–149; 2005) shows that field linguists often attempt to save indigenous languages and the information embedded in them by gathering words into dictionaries and grammar texts. This process has an underlying assumption that words mean ‘things’, and that, once saved, they can be reassembled with the proper grammar to represent experiences.

This perspective is natural for people with a written language, but for many indigenous people, experience bears its own expression and names are ‘written’ in the terrain. Thus, saving a language may be more dependent on conserving the place in which the language arises.

This became apparent to me in a conversation I had with an indigenous woman from Alaska. Her language, Eyak, is also disappearing: only one old woman now has it as her primary language. While her speech is being recorded and children are encouraged to converse with her, this grandmother is not worried about the demise of Eyak. The elder's advice is to learn the common syntax and grammar of another Athabaskan language, such as Dine, and to return to the land where “the words will be available in the surroundings”.