The last three fluent speakers, and the class of forty
Two nights a week in a room above the band office, forty people are learning a language that three people speak.
The class started with eleven. It is at forty now, and the room is the constraint rather than the interest.
Three fluent speakers remain, all of them over eighty, and two of them teach. The arithmetic of that is not lost on anyone in the room.
I am not worried about whether they learn it. I am worried about whether they have anyone to speak it to in ten years. That is a different problem and it needs more than a classroom.
One of the three
The nests are the answer to that, and the nests need wages — which is what the council voted on last week.
The class itself is not a language programme in the usual sense. There is no curriculum and no textbook, because there is no textbook. There are two elders, a whiteboard, and a rule that nobody speaks English after the first ten minutes.
It is slow. Adults learning a language they were meant to grow up in learn it badly at first and take it personally, which is a thing the elders have got good at managing. Attendance has not dropped once since February.
The forty are not a homogeneous room. About a third are in their twenties, a third are parents of school-age children, and the rest are older people who heard the language as children and lost it at school. That last group is the hardest to teach and the most determined.
There is a recording project running alongside the class — about four hundred hours so far, all three speakers, transcribed by the students as an exercise. It is slow and it is the most useful thing the class produces, because it will outlast everyone in the room.
Two nights a week. It has not been cancelled once.
Corrections and clarifications: tell us what we got wrong.