{"id":4034,"date":"2021-11-08T14:18:20","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T19:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=4034"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:22","slug":"dedicated-to-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2021\/11\/dedicated-to-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Dedicated to Language"},"content":{"rendered":"
Jorge L\u00f3pez Cortina immersed himself in a program teaching how to write the Cham language using its traditional script.<\/em> <\/div><\/div>\n

By Christopher Hann<\/p>\n

Growing up on the northern coast of Spain, Jorge L\u00f3pez Cortina was forced to confront what he describes as \u201ca complex linguistic situation.\u201d Although Spanish was the dominant tongue, many people spoke Asturian, a language that fellow Spaniards often derided.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the time of my parents,\u201d L\u00f3pez Cortina recalls, \u201cif you spoke that language in class you would be punished. In my time, you were mocked if you spoke Asturian. I learned very young not to talk about it unless you really want to take sides.\u201d<\/p>\n

For L\u00f3pez Cortina, an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, coming of age in such a fraught linguistic environment inspired his own curiosity about language. Years later, he found himself immersed in a program to teach how to write the Cham language using its traditional script. Cham is spoken, but rarely written, by Muslims in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country of Cambodia, and he could recall the very similar tensions over language that he had encountered as a boy in Spain.<\/p>\n

The story of the Cham language owes much to the diasporic history of the Cham people. Champa was an Indochinese kingdom that reigned for 15 centuries. Spread across what is today central and southern Vietnam, Champa was annexed by Vietnam in 1832. Some of the Cham population migrated to Cambodia, invited there, according to L\u00f3pez Cortina, by the Cambodian king.<\/p>\n

By the time L\u00f3pez Cortina arrived in Cambodia in 2013 while on sabbatical from Seton Hall, several hundred thousand people still spoke Cham, but there was little formal education in it because the official Cambodian language is Khmer. \u201cMost people who can speak Cham cannot read and write Cham,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

L\u00f3pez Cortina got involved with the Cham Heritage Expansion Program when a former doctoral classmate at Georgetown University invited him to Cambodia. Alberto P\u00e9rez Pereiro, a lecturer at the National University of Singapore, had founded the program in 2011 using a U.S. State Department grant designed to promote the teaching of the written Cham language, and he asked L\u00f3pez Cortina to develop a training curriculum for teachers.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe cares a lot about issues of language maintenance, language preservation, language revitalization,\u201d P\u00e9rez Pereiro says, speaking from his home in Cambodia. \u201cI knew this was the kind of thing he was going to dedicate himself to.\u201d<\/p>\n

L\u00f3pez Cortina had extensive experience in the field, including cowriting a Khmer textbook and writing or editing a dozen Spanish language textbooks for Berlitz International. \u201cAt the very beginning, I said let\u2019s take what they\u2019re teaching and put it in a textbook format. We wanted the written version of the language to gain visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next four years, until the program concluded in 2017, L\u00f3pez Cortina developed textbooks that were used to train 36 Cham language teachers, who in turn trained thousands of students. \u201cThis is what changed things in the community,\u201d L\u00f3pez Cortina recalls.<\/p>\n

He credits the Cham Heritage Expansion Program with helping to broaden the acceptance of the language \u2014 to normalize, in effect, its teaching and its study. \u201cBefore,\u201d he says, \u201cthere were people who insisted Cham had to be handwritten. Now they are discussing which fonts should be created for the next generation of textbooks. The discussion is very different from what it used to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

L\u00f3pez Cortina also edited \u201cRediscovering Cham Heritage in Cambodia,\u201d which contains text, side by side on each page, in Khmer, Cham and English. It\u2019s the first such book to be published in Cambodia, P\u00e9rez Pereiro explains. That these books can be found today in the National Library of Cambodia, L\u00f3pez Cortina says, might be the single biggest accomplishment of the Cham heritage program.<\/p>\n

But L\u00f3pez Cortina is careful \u2014 insistent, in fact \u2014 not to present himself as the savior of the Cham language. \u201cIt\u2019s not about me,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s about helping people to put their culture in a prominent place in a national setting. We plant a seed to start a conversation, and then people will use the language in whatever way they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christopher Hann is a freelance writer and editor in New Jersey.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jorge L\u00f3pez Cortina immersed himself in a program teaching how to write the Cham language using its traditional script. <\/p>\n

Continue ReadingDedicated to Language<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":5160,"featured_media":4037,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,5,17],"tags":[281,279,282,170,280,163,125],"class_list":["post-4034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-2020-2024","category-faculty","category-scholarship","tag-cham","tag-culture","tag-faculty","tag-foreign-languages","tag-identity","tag-scholarship","tag-servant-leadership","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4034"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4152,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4034\/revisions\/4152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}