Oig Tt O Mai G Et-Ñeo’okĭ: An Introduction to the O’odham Language of Ak-Chin

Abstract

The Ak-Chin Indian Community has been facing a steady decline in the population of O’odham speakers over the past four decades that presents the community with a troubling dilemma; if nothing is or can be done to reverse this trend, the O’odham language faces whole scale replacement by English in all facets of society as the working communicative language of the community. The present work has been designed to add to an Ak-Chin O’odham dialect specific repertoire of learner centered language teaching materials to encourage a re- flourishment of O’odham as an everyday vernacular means of communication between members of the Ak-Chin Indian Community. The lessons presented in this document aim at streamlining the language acquisition process among adult heritage learners in such a way that pertinent language structures, vocabulary and grammatical information are provided without the use of technical or esoteric linguistic jargon that can sometimes overwhelm and alienate learners from instructional content. Learners are taken from the most basic and rudimental aspects of O’odham sentence structure and progress through the lessons in a scaffolded way to continuously build upon previously acquired linguistic skills. The lessons are supplemented by frequent practice exercises, an O’odham-English/English-O’odham glossary, quick reference grammar tables and explanations, as well as answer keys to each practice exercise. This work has been structured to be used either as a classroom teaching material or as an autodidactic resource for heritage learners. It is hoped that the work presented here will contribute in a positive way to the emergence of more O’odham speakers in the Ak-Chin community.