Can Fresno preserve the dying Hmong language?

[theking]

Hmong is a ‘dying’ language – but it’s being preserved at this Fresno school

It’s presentation day in a fifth grade classroom at Vang Pao Elementary School in Fresno, and some students are more shy than others. But 11-year-old Irene Her stands in front of the classroom, confidently weaving Hmong words together to talk about the “lub vab,” a basket tool used in the Southeast Asian culture.

Irene is among the inaugural class of students who began kindergarten in Fresno Unified’s Hmong Dual Language Immersion Program in 2018. Billed as the most extensive of its kind in the nation, the program is building up each year, welcoming new students into TK and kindergarten, while the other classes move up.

About a quarter of the school’s 850 students are in the dual immersion program. Next year the school will have Hmong classes in all grades through sixth for the first time.

It’s important for the Hmong community in California to study their language here and keep it alive since they don’t have their own country to return to, says Kao-Ly Yang, a lecturer and coordinator of the Hmong studies program at Fresno State. Hmong people have lived in areas of Laos, Vietnam and China.

“The countries where they came from do not have schools that teach Hmong language. Our Hmong American children cannot forget their roots,” she says. Plus studying in a dual immersion program also will “enhance their English skills, and give them the potential to have better jobs and better lives.”

The Fresno region is home to the second-largest population of Hmong in the United States, at 35,000, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s second only to Minneapolis-St. Paul. During the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited Hmong to fight “the Secret War” in Laos. But after the U.S. withdrew, many were forced to flee or be killed as they faced persecution. Many settled in the U.S., including the revered General Vang Pao, who led the Secret Army, and later the Hmong American community. Pao died in the Fresno area in 2011.

At Vang Pao Elementary, students learn not only the Hmong language, which shares similarities with Chinese, but the group’s history too.

Irene, who is Hmong and the granddaughter of immigrants, wasn’t always so confident speaking the language. Like 90% of students entering the program, English was her first language.

But after beginning the program in kindergarten, “I started speaking Hmong to my mom, and after school, she would speak Hmong to me,” she says. Now she feels fluent.