The man who kept the Lakota language alive

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/shortcuts/2013/jun/23/albert-white-hat-kept-lakota-language-alive

The Native American teacher and author Albert White Hat died recently. He was a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe who dedicated himself to preserving the endangered Lakota language, even helping with the translation for the Lakota conversation in Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves. Most of the few thousand remaining speakers are elderly and the fear is that Lakota may join the roll call of dead languages, which is increasing at the rate of one a fortnight. Yet it is a language with a rich, varied and fascinating vocabulary all of its own ...

Iwaktehda: to go home in triumph having taken scalps.

Akaspa: to be provoked beyond endurance.

Waśihdaka: one who gets angry at everything.

Wićawokha: a man who lives with his wife's relations (literally, a buried man).

Albert White Hat, preserver of Lakota language, dies at 74

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/albert-white-hat-preserver-of-lakota-language-dies-at-74/2013/06/23/a05d49be-da81-11e2-9df4-895344c13c30_story.html

Albert White Hat, who was instrumental in teaching and preserving the endangered Lakota American Indian language and translated the Hollywood movie “Dances With Wolves” into Lakota for its actors, died June 11 at a South Dakota hospital. He was 74.

He had prostate cancer, according to family and friends.

Mr. White Hat, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, wrote several books about Lakota, a language fluently spoken by fewer than 6,000 people. The average age of those speakers is 60, and less than 14 percent of the Lakota population in South Dakota and North Dakota — where the vast majority of Lakota speakers live — speak their native tongue.

The first native Lakota speaker to publish a Lakota textbook and glossary, Mr. White Hat was considered an activist for traditional ways of living, according to his daughter, Emily White Hat. He created an orthography for the language, which he had taught since 1975, and was head of the Lakota Studies Department at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.