JACKSON - Unless drastic changes are implemented on the Wind River Reservation, the Arapaho language will die within 15 years, a language professor said Tuesday.

Eugene Ridgely Jr., director of the bilingual education program for the Wind River Tribal College in Ethete, said the key is to speak Arapaho in the home and elsewhere as much as possible.

"Without the language, you don't have the culture," Ridgely said. "The stories, even everyday conversation, it's different than we're going to have with English."

An Arapaho language revitalization effort is being undertaken by the tribe members and was spearheaded by a Council of Elders concerned with the culture loss. A meeting with the Arapaho Business Council, Council of Elders, Arapaho Language and Cultural Commission, school officials and teachers will be held today at 11 a.m. at the college.

"First, we've got to get the people to care," Ridgely said. "If they don't care then we have a big problem. We need to lay down the groundwork to address those (language) concerns. … We need cooperation from every entity that we're going to talk to."

Ways of infusing the Arapaho language in schools and in homes is the group's primary focus.

Ridgely said the college conducted a survey in 1995, asking students, parents and grandparents in the community about the language they spoke.

"From there we drew some conclusions that (the Arapaho language) was in a sense declining very rapidly," he said. "This was also foreseen back in the years of the 1970s."

In the 1970s, the level of language loss was determined to be a "three" on a scale of one to five, with five being a level of total extinction.

The Arapaho language was flourishing until the 1950s.

"It's gotten worse really fast," Ridgely said. "Now we maybe have about 15 years of fluency left, maybe less."

Years of fluency are determined by the age of elders who are still fluent. Of the nearly 8,000 tribe members, less than 1,000 are fluent and at a conversational speaking stage, according to the college.

Ridgely said some words don't translate into English. He said some stories told in the Arapaho language don't translate readily to English, and those stories are important in the history of the tribe.

The loss of native languages are the result, in part, of the U.S. government and churches infusing reservations with European thinking and the English language.

The "No Child Left Behind" act also makes teaching native languages in schools difficult, because so much emphasis is placed on traditional curriculum, Ridgely said.

Language revitalization efforts have been successful for tribes in the Hawaiian islands.

"It starts with total immersion from the little ones up, gradually working their way to speaking adults," Ridgely said. "Those revitalization efforts will take several years; it won't happen overnight."

Non-speakers and non-tribe members need to be concerned about the disappearance of the language, too, Ridgely said, if people want to experience native cultures.

One way to ensure the viability of the language is to pair children with fluent, Arapaho-speaking elders, Ridgely said.

"This is going to be the first step in many," he explained. "We want to get the word out that it needs to be addressed soon or else we will all be English speaking within 15 years. It's going to be an uphill struggle."