Northern Marianas College President Galvin Deleon Guerrero addresses the crowd at the launch of “Finu’ Chamorro For Beginners by Dr. Faye Untalan” at Joeten-Kiyu Public Library on Friday.
Dr. Faye Untalan, left, with Dr. Barbara Hunter, interim director of Northern Marianas College’s School of Business and a former student of Dr. Untalan at UH Manoa, Leo Pangelinan, executive director of the Northern Marianas Humanities Council, and Manny Borja, a recognized Chamorro language expert from the CNMI.
“FINU’ Chamorro,” authored by Dr. Faye Untalan, was launched Friday at the Joeten-Kiyu Public Library as a special collaborative project between Northern Marianas College’s Proa Publications and the University of Guam Press.
The 450-page book, which is intended for post-secondary education classes, covers 24 units and includes supplemental appendices and two glossaries.
The units and appendices discuss topics, such as the “hu”-type pronouns and transitive statements, emphatic pronouns, pronunciation, parts of the body, and much more.
Untalan, a retired faculty member at University of Hawaii at Manoa, was a longtime teacher of the Chamorro language there.
She said the inspiration to create the textbook began in the 1990s after she was approached by Chamorro students at the Honolulu campus.
“Some Chamorro students came to me and said, ‘Dr. Untalan we’re required to take up a foreign language for our education. We don’t even know our own language. Is it possible for you to give us that option?’ That really touched me. It never occurred to me how deeply this problem [of language learning] was among our youth,” she said in her remarks during the book launch at JKPL.
Untalan developed the course, during which she realized the need for a comprehensive resource for her students.
It was her observation that students who came to Hawaii from Guam or the CNMI had varying levels of exposure to their language and culture.
To that end, her development team for “Finu’ Chamorro” consisted of faculty members from the University of Guam, Guam Community College, NMC and UH Manoa.
“So we had to kind of coordinate and make sure [the book] was woven together so that it becomes a single process to learn,” she said.
Untalan said she also had numerous manamko’ advisors whom she sought out while putting the book together.
She said her book follows the CNMI orthography or spelling system, despite writing the book with the intention to also share it on Guam, which has its own orthography.
Untalan said she wanted her book to be written in the CNMI spelling system, which “reflects … spoken Chamorro.”
NMC President Galvin Deleon Guerrero said the book launch was a celebration of “being good stewards of our language and our culture.”
“Finu’ Chamorro” reflects “the more current discussions we’ve been having about the Chamorro language and it’s really coming at a critical time as we’re going through a cultural renaissance throughout the entire Marianas,” he added. “I hope that this will be a resource we can use to help keep our culture and our language alive because our culture lives in our language. And we cannot let it die.”
Copies of the book can be purchased at the UOG Press website, uogpress.com
A book launch on Guam is set for Jan. 26 at the UOG College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.