Our Adai ancestors have been in this area for as long as anyone knows. Long enough that their language was what linguists call a language isolate, meaning, it shows no true relationship to any languages around it. Dr. John Sibley, the man who originally gathered the little we have of our language, once said that our language “differs from all others, and is so difficult to speak or understand that no nation can speak ten words of it”. What we have of the Adaizan language is a list of words originally gathered by Dr. John Sibley around 1805.
In the 1700s, the Adai homelands were colonized by the Spanish. Many of our ancestors began to forget their indigenous language. By the mid 1800s, our language was unfortunately gone, completely replaced by Spanish and later English.
Many of our ancestors still spoke the languages of their Spanish colonizers until very recently and spoke a unique dialect of Spanish not spoken anywhere else.
For the last few years, efforts have been made to revitalize our ancestral language from what little remains of it. First, the language list was very inconsistent in how it was written and needed a standardization in spelling. Because our language was extinct, it was impossible to understand what sounds were heard when it was transcribed. However, Dr. John Sibley also transcribed other languages which are still alive. By comparing these languages as Dr. Sibley heard them, then an understanding of how our language would have sounded to Dr. Sibley can be reconstructed based on the letters he used. From this, now we have a standard alphabet or writing system.
We also had major problems with understanding sentence structure and grammar; however, the word list hid these things in plain sight. For example, we were able to tell that adjectives follow nouns. This came from three words that were records in the list: newan- quail/partridge (newâ in standardized form), newatocat – pheasant (newâ-tokat in standardized form), and tocat- large. (tokat in standardized in form). The relationship between these three words revealed that our ancestors were telling Dr. Sibley that the newâ was a quail and that the “big quail”, newâ-tokat, is a pheasant.
Other struggles came up in deciphering the numbers and others in realizing that there were errors in the original transcription in some spots. The list may have only had a limited number of words, but it unlocks countless clues into itself and how it works and continues to do so as it comes back to life.
Efforts are currently underway to create a dictionary and a children’s book. The Lord’s Prayer and the Star-Spangled Banner are also translated into the Adaizan language.