infundibulum

Tlingit, which should be pronounced something like “Klinkit” according to Wikipedia , is a Na-Dené language spoken in what is now Alaska and British Columbia (same family as Navajo, how about that?) .

That’s a long way from Stratford-on-Avon, but you can go see a version of Macbeth in Tlingit this month at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC:

Perseverance to Do ‘Macbeth’ in Tlingit

But this time the 12-member cast, whose ages range from 15 to 42, has agreed to perform most of the play in Tlingit (pronounced klink-it).

“It’s like running a marathon, without training for it,” said actor Ishmael Hope, who plays Malcolm, the son of King Duncan who is killed by Macbeth. “But we’re doing the work to make it happen.

“None of us is going to sound like a fluent speaker, because no matter how meticulous we are, it’s a difficult language. But we’ll still be able to convey meaning.”

Apparently the actors don’t really “understand” their lines, except insofar as they understand their English equivalents:

“It takes 10 times longer to learn just one line,” said Waid, who plays Macbeth and has performed Shakespeare in theaters worldwide with various production groups since he was a teenager. “As far as the structure of the language and the grammar, it’s still a mystery.”

That’s kind of weird… but when you’re dealing with a languages that has very few fluent speakers, the “publicity” aspect of a project like this is arguably at least as important as the “preservation” aspect. I imagine it would be almost impossible to put a big production like this together exclusively with fluent speakers. How many Tlingit speakers are actors, after all.

I wonder if they will be publishing the text in some form for Tlingit learners.

Some rummaging about for stuff about Tlingit turned up TroubledRaven.com, a site by Lance Twitchell, who is the language consultant for the DC performance and mentioned in the article. He has some nice materials on Tlingit: Lingit X’einaxh’.