Living an Endangered Language

While the environment is an important component in vocabulary acquisition, I argue that the language''s status plays a significant role in the level of difficulty a learner faces during the acquisition process. In short, the vocabulary acquisition process becomes increasingly more difficult when the target language is an endangered language spoken by a small community of speakers and the learner is a native speaker of an Indo-European language and, culturally, a Westerner (or an outsider to the indigenous community). In this case study, a Western learner begins to learn the Nahuatl language, a language once the lingua franca of pre-conquest Mexico and currently an indigenous language spoken by approximately 1.2 million people in modern-day Mexico. The case study follows the Western learner''s attempts in an informal and a formal environment over the course of one year and demonstrates the successes and failures of this Western learner as he acquires vocabulary in the Nahuatl language.