Bloomington man helps save dying languages

As a young teenager, Indrek Park learned to play bagpipes in Estonia, a country less than half the size of Indiana with one-fifth its population.\nNow 34 and an IU graduate student, Park is still playing. Last week, he played his Estonian bagpipes for a sixth-grade class at Bloomington's University Elementary School because the students were studying the region in Europe where Estonia lies. \nThe students giggled as Park finished his tunes with a loud honk from the pipes.\nGrowing up in a small country with its own native language, Estonian, Park developed a desire to protect the languages and cultures of small, indigenous groups of people. And if bagpipes could talk, Park's would tell about a man who has traveled the world, working with people to discover, preserve and revitalize their dying languages.\n"People say, 'What is the point?' But when a language dies, it's like an endangered species dies," he said. \nBeyond social and academic value, Park said he enjoys studying languages out of pure fascination. He can't give an exact count of all the languages he can speak, but Park generally lists Estonian, Tibetan, Korean, Chinese and the major European languages. \n"Languages are fascinating, like a hobby, if you get to know the soul of a language," he said.\nRight now, he is working to get his Ph.D. in linguistics and trying to get grants for a project with the American Indian Studies Research Institute. The project is focused on revitalizing Arikara, an American Indian language in North Dakota with few speakers left.\nIn the beginning, although his focus was not as narrow as it is today, he still had the same researcher's heart, he remembered.\nWhen he was 6, he convinced a girl to escape kindergarten for a research adventure with him. When someone noticed their absence, the police were called and, unfortunately for the young adventurers, cut the outing short.\n"The kindergarten built a big fence around it after that incident," he said.\nAfter that, his research adventures were more successful. In his late teens, he spent summers and winters with a friend in Siberia studying the Nenets and Manisi people, collecting their folk songs and materials to donate to the Estonian National Museum in Tartu.\nWhat was it like to live with strangers in 50-below-zero weather while researching their culture?\n"Oh, nice. We had our own reindeer team and stayed in a teepee," Park said.\nWithin the next two years, Park was invited to come to America to intern with Cultural Survival, Inc., a program founded to defend the human rights of indigenous peoples and oppressed ethnic minorities. \nHe later studied on scholarship in Beijing, where he met his wife, Sayon, who is Korean. They both knew English, but Sayon did not speak Chinese. They met the first week Park was in China, when he translated for her to help her find the dining halls. They married two years later.\nHis translating abilities have been helpful for more people than Sayon, however. \nCurrently, Park is using his ability to grasp foreign languages teaching Qeq'chi, a Mayan language, to members of St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bloomington. Park, who is involved in the church, is giving the language instruction to prepare the group for a trip to Chichipate, Guatemala -- the church's "sister parish" community -- this November.\nSt. Thomas' Rev. Lyle McKee said he has been very impressed with Park's ability to grasp the language so quickly.\n"On his first trip to Chichipate (in 2001), he picked up the language while he was there," McKee said. "It's simply amazing. I've never met anyone like him."\nPark plans to be with the group in November and has been working on compiling a grammar dictionary for the people in Chichipate, McKee said.\nNow, after playing his bagpipes in America at the top of the World Trade Center, on the Great Wall of China, in Guatemala's rain forests, halfway up Mt. Everest and in a Bloomington elementary classroom, Park plans to move back to Estonia someday with Sayon, following more extensive research in American Indian languages.\nBeyond those tentative plans, Park remains unsure, much like a 6-year-old ready for more adventures.\n"Long term is hard to see," he said. "We'll see what happens"