Community Response
Community Advocation
The community response and attitude to the language situation is another micro-level factor. Fortunately for the Sakun language, this micro-factor seems to have a positive affect on the situation.
According to the Endangered Language Archive, the Sakun community is a major player in the preservation of it's language by advocating for education in their mother tongue, the translation of texts into Sakun for usage by the people, and written documentation of their history and oral stories should something happen to the physical speakers.
The Sakun community takes great pride in their language and their heritage, which provides a promising outlook for their involvement and assurance of the preservation of their language (Thomas, A Grammar of Sakun (Sukur) 3-4). This is done in a handful of ways, including participation in language archives, the creation of a writing system, and attempts to create a language community via social media.
The Endangered Language Archive
In addition, the Sakun community's cooperation with academic researchers for things like the Sakun collection on the Endangered Language Archive provide second language materials for the Sakun diaspora to learn their heritage language. The archive also provides some of the documentation that the community advocates for. It is important to note that much of this collection has visual and audial deposits rather than written ones, meaning a certain fluency in the language is necessary to understand them.
This archive is useful for preservation and, in theory, for teaching the language, but it is unclear on how useful the archive actually is to the community. It is not documented how well the materials on the archive can be used to teach Sakun as a second language, and it is not noted how much access the speaker community even has to the archive.
The Writing System
The UNESCO world heritage site has done wonders for allowing the community to develop their language. The management plan, required for the UNESCO site, has allowed for a section on language development (Thomas, Building Community Participation into Documentation Design: Lessons Learned in Sakun (Sukur) 69-70). Part of this language development is seen in the creation of a writing system for the language.
The current orthography for the Sakun language was introduced to the community back in the 90s. People have adapted well to this orthography compared to previous ones, especially those who were already literate in Hausa or English (Thomas, A Grammar of Sakun (Sukur) 64). As of 2006, the writing system was still a work in progress however - in the Sakun exhibit on ELAR, there is a video of a Sakun speaker about the importance of developing a more consistent writing system. There is no translation of this video so it cannot be summarized, but it serves to show how the community is still advocating for further development of their language.
According to Thomas's piece titled Building Community Participation into Documentation Design: Lessons Learned in Sakun (Sukur), the current notion system was worked on by native Sakun speakers in addition to the outsiders (64). The current orthography lacks the tonality of the phoenetic system, a decision made due a variety of factors, and uses letters to make it as similar to the Hausa and English orthographies as possible given the amount of contact between the languages (64). Aside from the lack of tone in the orthography, two other issues have arisen between the phoenetic system and the orthography regarding clitics and word boundaries (66).
There has been one publication in the Sakun language, a pamphlet by Reverend L. T. Waziri titled "Dzum tahda gəma zhəglah nə gəma sakun”, or "teachings of the word of God in the Sakun language". This pamphlet consists of a translations of the Lord's Prayer, a collection of Psalms, and an explanation of why the text was produced (Thomas, A Grammar of Sakun (Sukur) 6).
Social Media
There is evidence of attempts to create a language community via the internet for Sakun speakers, however there is not much done with it. There is a facebook page for the language, but the page has few posts and only 5 likes. The page does appear to have some noteable language resources including a video of a Sakun gospel song though.
As far as other social media sites go, there appears to be no discussion or use of the language. Searches on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit yielded no results. As far as Youtube, there are a handful of videos on the community itself, some of which include snippets of the language, but there are no adequate resources.
This lack of social media presence could possibly stem from a variety of factors including:
- their traditional lifestyle - the Sakun people are proud of their traditional way of life and they do quite well at sticking to it. Things like the internet and technology go against tradition, so it is plausible that they have chosen not to adapt to the use of it.
- lack of steady access to the internet - it is unclear if the Sakun speaker population has steady internet connection or access to the technology neccessary for an online langauge community.
- the newness of the writing system - it is unclear how widely the writing system is used. If there is only a small portion of people using the writing system it would not make a lot of sense to have an online language community, especially when considering the other factors mentioned above. However, it is important to note that according to the Writing in Sakun page of Michael Thomas's personal website, there are current efforts to make the writing system more usable in a social media setting.