CHamoru is the 4000 year old language of the indigenous people of Låguas and Gåni, a chain of islands in the Western Pacific forming the Marianas Archipelago. It is a complex ancestral Mother Tongue, also referred to as Fino’ Håya. Originating in island Southeast Asia, CHamoru is counted as one of the Austronesian languages of the Pacific. It is characterized by a distinctive grammatical structure, a rich oral literary tradition, and a vocabulary shaped by millennia of intimate relationship with the Pacific Ocean, the land, the seasons, and the spirit world and later encounters with colonial powers and inter-island connections.

The CHamoru language was passed down orally for over 150 generations before shifts in American language policy radically transformed indigenous language usage in Guam. These changes were rooted in early 20th century English-Only policies established under the United States Naval Administration, beginning with Governor Richard P. Leary’s General Orders No. 12 and 13 in 1900. The continuity of the CHamoru language was further threatened in 1917 by Naval Governor Roy Campbell Smith through Executive General Order No. 243, which designated English as Guam’s sole official language.

The ensuing enforcement of “No CHamoru” rules in schools and public spaces along with implemented penalties created a profound disconnect from speaking CHamoru language which has persisted across several generations of CHamoru families for over a century. The natural intergenerational transmission of the CHamoru language in settings like homes, neighbourhoods, schools, and community social spaces has been severely disrupted as a result. CHamoru-speaking parents were urged to speak English at home so that their children would do well academically and find good jobs. With the granting of American citizenship to the people of Guam in 1950, this English-only assimilationist propaganda extended to being good American citizens. Language alienation has subsequently been further impacted by urbanization, land displacement, militarization and large-scale out-migration of CHamoru families.

There were efforts by local government leaders and educators to mitigate the damage caused as early as the 1960s and 70s. CHamoru became one of the two official languages of Guam. A CHamoru language program, under the umbrella of bilingual education, was established in Guam’s public schools. Institutions of higher learning offered courses which led to a degree-major in CHamoru studies. The first CHamoru Language Commission was established and worked diligently to create an orthography and produce resources. These preservation efforts laid the infrastructure for the newly reconstituted Kumisión i Fino’ CHamoru yan i Fina’nå’guen i Historia yan i Lina’la’ i Taotao Tåno’ (Kumisión) established by the CHamoru Heritage Act of 2016 to implement its legal mandates. Notwithstanding the diligent and formative work of language preservation in the last fifty years, the multigenerational disconnect in speaking CHamoru has exacted an obliterating blow on the wellbeing of our indigenous language. The challenge to revitalize is both urgent and formidable; especially so, since the descendants of the First People of Guam have become a shrinking majority in our Homeland.

The trajectory of continuous language loss in the past three decades is documented in a Language Revitalization Study by Dr. Kenneth Gofigan Kuper, which was commissioned by the CHamoru Language Commission (Kumisión) entitled, Giha Mås Mo’na. The study cites census data collected by the Guam Bureau of Statistics and Plans which indicate that CHamoru speaker demographics have shifted significantly over two decades. In 1990, the island had 133,152 residents, reporting only 34,598 CHamoru speakers. By 2000, while the total population grew to 154,805, the number of speakers declined to 30,708. This trend continued into 2010, when the population reached 159,358 but the reported number of CHamoru speakers fell to 25,827. It is worth noting that while the 2020 U.S. Census shows that roughly 37% of the island’s residents identify as CHamoru, only about one-fifth of that group uses the language at home. Fluency is largely limited to elders over the age of 65, with younger CHamoru generations speaking English as their first and only language.

According to the UNESCO International Language Endangerment Framework, the CHamoru language is presently classified as "definitively endangered," characterized by “Children no longer learn the language as the mother tongue at home.” Unless purposeful revitalization interventions occur, the CHamoru language faces the prospect of quickly becoming a language without a community of daily speakers in the next few decades. The consequences of that final blow would be catastrophic — not only for the CHamoru people, but for the world’s cultural and linguistic heritage.

Most CHamoru learners today are school children, young adults and parents of children who are studying CHamoru as a second language. First-language and semi-fluent CHamoru speakers are typically either counted among elders or the great-grand parental generation in Guam. They did not learn CHamoru in school and were not taught to read or write in CHamoru. Nor were they taught spelling or rules of grammar. Many have lamented that they do not know how to teach CHamoru literacy to their children and grandchildren and have expressed a need for assistance to bridge this gap.

The Historical Context for Indigenous Language Loss in Guam

Language does not exist in a vacuum; it connects people to their past and to their future. Understanding the state of the CHamoru language today requires some familiarity with what has happened to CHamoru speakers.

Before sustained contact with European colonizers beginning in 1668, CHamoru society was organized around a highly sophisticated kinship system built on clans (matrilineal lineage groups), extended family networks, and village-based social relationships. This system was not merely a method of social organization — it was a living cultural constitution that governed identity, responsibility, land stewardship, cultural knowledge transmission, caregiving, conflict resolution, and spiritual practice. The clan system defined a person’s identity in the most fundamental sense. To be CHamoru was to know your clan, to know your relationship with other clans, and to know your obligations to those who came before you and those who would come after. Kinship networks provided the infrastructure of daily life: the communal labor of farming and fishing, the care of children and elders, the transmission of language and oral tradition from generation to generation. The land was not an individual possession, but a shared inheritance held in trust by families for descendants not yet born.

Ancestral land ties were inseparable from kinship identity. Specific clans held stewardship over specific territories, and those territories carried names — CHamoru place names that encoded the family’s history, their relationship with the land, and their obligations as its caretakers. The loss of land was therefore not merely an economic injury; it was an identity injury, a relational injury, a wound that reached into the deepest structures of what it meant to be CHamoru.

The traditional kinship architecture of CHamoru society was not dismantled overnight. It eroded across four centuries of sustained colonial assault. Spanish colonization beginning in 1668 introduced epidemic disease, military violence, forced population consolidation (Reducción), conversion to Christianity, and the deliberate suppression of precontact CHamoru social organization. The Spanish colonial period saw a decimation of the CHamoru population — from an estimated 50,000–80,000 to fewer than 5,000 survivors by the early 18th century. Miscegenation led to a hybrid race of indigenous descendants. Modern CHamoru people carry the DNA and legacy of this colonial history in our bloodline, customs and traditions, surnames, rites of passage and cultural identity.

American administration beginning in 1898 brought new pressures: the imposition of English-only education, the regulation of CHamoru cultural practices, the subordination of CHamoru governance to Naval administration, and further disruption of traditional land tenure systems. The traumatic Japanese occupation of Guam from 1941 to 1944 and the subsequent American liberation and reconstruction period proved perhaps the most transformative of all. The Battle of Guam resulted in the deaths of thousands of CHamoru civilians, the destruction of villages, and the psychological wounds of occupation.

Following World War II, the United States military exercised eminent domain over large swaths of Guam’s land, acquiring approximately one-third of the island’s total area for military use by the early 1950s. Entire villages were displaced. Families who had maintained multigenerational relationships with specific lands — relationships encoded in their clan histories, oral traditions, and kinship networks — were removed from those lands without meaningful compensation and resettled in unfamiliar communities. The land that had anchored their identity was no longer theirs.

These cascading displacements — from the 17th century through the 20th — fractured the traditional kinship systems that had sustained CHamoru identity, culture, and community resilience. In their place, many families were left with fragments: half-remembered names, incomplete family trees, stories that ended abruptly at the edge of living memory, and a profound uncertainty about where they came from and who their people were.

The consequences of these historical disruptions are visible in the CHamoru community today. The most devastating is evident in the current state of the CHamoru language. Three generations have been disconnected from a linguistic heritage that has bound ancestors and their descendants for four millennia.

The disconnection is not merely historical; it is experienced in the present as a felt absence — the sense of not fully knowing one’s own story, one’s own people, or one’s own place in the world.

The crisis of language disconnection is not limited to Guam. The CHamoru diaspora — estimated at 100,000+ people spread across California, Washington, Nevada, Hawaii, Texas, and other states — faces unique challenges in maintaining cultural connection across distances. Many diaspora CHamoru individuals and families left Guam in search of economic opportunity or in response to continued land pressures, and many have spent decades with limited access to the cultural resources, language environments, and community relationships that support identity formation.

Ensuring CHamoru Language Viability for the Next Generation

Fortunately, island leaders, educators and grassroots organizations are actively engaged in heeding the urgent call to action to save the CHamoru language. A Language Revitalization movement, led by the Kumisión i Fino’ CHamoru yan i Fina’nå’guen i Historia yan i Lina’la’ i Taotao Tåno’ is growing and gaining momentum as educational institutions and diasporic communities of CHamoru people are reclaiming their heritage as part of the painful process of decolonizing and asserting cultural sovereignty.

The key to language continuity is usage. Without children speakers and intergenerational interaction no amount of advocacy and programming can be successful in revitalizing CHamoru. Thankfully, Guam is making strides in several significant ways to promote and facilitate CHamoru language learning and speaking. Community awareness and commitment is strengthening. Politicians are fully aware of the situation at hand. CHamoru language educators recognize the urgency.

Educational institutions have begun to collaborate to address issues of teacher preparedness and responsible pedagogy that can drive success in the classroom. We proudly boast the existence of two CHamoru medium or immersion schools dedicated to creating the nurturing language nesting environments for accelerated language learning. Parents of the children enrolled in these immersion programs are expected to make a commitment to learn CHamoru and use it in the home. First language CHamoru speakers are being urged by their own children and grandchildren to become part of the solution by becoming the lead speakers in their family gatherings and homes. We have laws, albeit often unfunded, that require children to learn about Guam history and CHamoru language and culture in Guam’s public school system. CHamoru is one of the two official languages of Guam. There is also a growing hunger in both the local and diasporic CHamoru community for language learning and teaching.

Undoing the damage caused by nearly a century of English-only instruction and the breakdown of intergeneration transmission of the language remains a daunting task but it no longer seems insurmountable. Well-aware that CHamoru is largely being learned as a second language, the Kumisión has created a range of tools to assist in promoting the official CHamoru Orthography, which is a standardized spelling cannon for developing CHamoru literacy through reading and writing. Books written in CHamoru are beginning to proliferate. These are all signs of progress. Many stakeholders are working hard to ensure that ours will not be known as the generation responsible for cutting the most precious ties that bind us with our ancestors, the Taotao Tåno’.

About the Author

Dr. Laura M. Torres Souder is President and CEO of Souder, Betances and Associates, Inc. Dr. Souder earned her BA at Emanuel College in Boston and her MA and PhD in American Studies from the Universityof Hawaii as a Joint Doctoral Intern at the East West Center. She completed a post-doctoral Ford Foundation Minority Fellowship at De Paul University in Chicago. Laura has presented at Conferences throughout Micronesia, Asia and the South Pacific and has been part of research efforts sponsored by the South Pacific Commission, UNESCO and other entities on the effects of modernization and development on Pacific Island people, language and culture. She has written an historical monograph by the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) at UOG, which was republished as a 40 th Anniversary 3 rd Edition in March 2024 as Daughters of the Island, CHamoru Women Organizers and Other Writings.

Dr. Souder is a MARC Research Associate at the University of Guam, where she taught Guam History and distinguished herself as a leading CHamoru Revisionist Historian. Laura was co-editor of Chamorro Self-Determination and has also recently co-authored four books with Dr. Samuel Betances, her husband, in aseries entitled, Island InSights. She is a featured columnist for the Guam Daily Post. She was recently recognized by the Guam Women’s Chamber of Commerce as the first CHamoru woman to have published a book. She currently serves as the Chair of the Guam Indigenous Heritage Alliance and the Kumisión i Fino’CHamoru yan i Fina’nå’guen i Historia yan i Lina’la’ i Taotao Tåno’