YAKIMA, Wash. -- There are only about 200 or so remaining Sahaptin speakers, and there may never be another as fluent as 88-year-old Virginia Beavert.

But Sahaptin, a general term for the language that includes the Yakama dialect, will live on.

Beavert herself has assured that with the Ichishkiin Sinwit Yakama/Yakima Sahaptin Dictionary, which will be released next month by the University of Washington Press.

The translation dictionary, which she co-wrote with University of Washington linguistics professor Sharon Hargus, comes with a CD of Beavert pronouncing 9,830 Sahaptin words and phrases.

It may inspire younger members of the Yakama Nation to learn the language, she said.

"I pray about it all the time," Beavert said.

Born in Oregon, Beavert grew up in a village that spoke Sahaptin and was the first of her family to attend school of any kind. It was in the mid-1940s, when she spent three years in New Mexico as a U.S. Army Air Force radio operator, that she learned how easily the language could be lost through lack of use.

"I called home," Beavert said. "(My mother) answered the phone, and she was so excited it was me. She was talking Indian to me. She was talking so fast. And I couldn't understand a word of it."

It came back almost instantly once she got home. Then, in her 40s, Beavert returned to school to get a sociology degree from Central Washington University. She wrote the first Sahaptin guide, the Yakima Language Practical Dictionary, in 1975. She's been director of the Sahaptin program at Heritage University since 1991 and has taught the language at the University of Oregon in Eugene since last year.

"I'm getting rather tired, you know," Beavert said. "But I have these students that keep telling me, 'We haven't learned enough.'"

That's where the new dictionary, which greatly expands upon the 1975 version, comes in. Though she's healthy, Beavert knows that she and the other native speakers of the language won't be around forever. The book, however, will be her legacy -- something she discussed with Hargus, the UW professor, while the two worked on it.

"One day she told me, 'We were born for this work,' and I said, 'You know, maybe we were,'" Beavert said.

Hargus, who spent countless hours and dollars traveling from Seattle to Central Washington and back to finish the book, believes the new dictionary is important from a linguistic perspective as well as a cultural one. The language's seemingly free method of word order, for instance, could be the basis of future linguistic study, she said.

From a cultural perspective, preserving the language in a volume like this is key to preserving identity.

"I would think this would be a tremendous asset to lay people, to members of the tribe," Hargus said.

Greg Anderson, director of the Salem, Ore.-based Living Tongues Institute, which is dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages, agreed. Every language provides its own perspective on the world, offering its speakers a unique prism through which to see, he said.

"Languages are often the most salient form of identity they can have," Anderson said. "They lose their language, they lose their cultural identity."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509-577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

On the Web: http://depts.washington.edu/llc/olr/sahaptin