"We've had suggestions from people, 'Wouldn't it be great if Celebration could showcase some of its projects?'" Belarde said. "The idea is to show the variety of the language. There's a lot of study and learning going on in Southeast Alaska, and Celebration is a good time to show that we're about more than signing and dancing."

Jordan Latcher of the Sealaska Heritage Institute office in Ketchikan will lead the Haida workshops.

Daphne Wright, Vivian Mork, Nancy Douglas, Yarrow Varra and Hans Chester will help at the Tlingit workshops, which will include an overview of the four-year-old Tlingit language program at Harborview Elementary School.

The University of Northern British Columbia offers college-level classes in Shim-al-gyack, or Sm'‡lgyax, and has even created a Living Legacy Talking Dictionary, http://web.unbc.ca/~smalgyax/. The language is obviously more common near Ketchikan and Metlakatla, but there is an ongoing talking circle in Juneau. Nancy Barnes, an aide to Sen. Albert Kookesh and a student at Roberts' summer workshops, leads it at her Douglas home.

"Everybody is real passionate about it, because we know these are endangered languages," Barnes said. "We're trying to do what we can, and we hope other people in other communities will do what we're doing."

"It's just been amazing," Roberts said of the circle. "That shows the absolute dedication to the language, and it says a lot about how much the Tsimshians care.

"I always talk about deep winter, a time when nothing can be done," she said. "If there's no one sitting here, speaking the language, Nancy's friends or whomever, we will reach deep winter."

Shim-al-gyack shares a few works with Tlingit and Haida, but the languages are radically different, Roberts said.

"If I speak the Tsimshian language and I stood next to a Tlingit speaker or a Haida speaker, I wouldn't have a clue nor would they," she said.

The Tsimshian language project, part of a teaching curriculum called "Language by Osmosis" uses the Total Physical Response approach to language study, has been widely used by Sealaska Heritage Institute and the University of Alaska. Total Physical Response combines vocabulary with commands and motions.

"The reason it's so powerful is that you're moving and there's absolutely no stress at the early point of the class to speak," Roberts said. "Just the fact that you're hearing the sounds, seeing the character do the action and copying the person doing the action, that alone gets it into your brain's banks. It's almost like language by osmosis."