The original cast of The Avengers has reunited to dub the 2012 superhero film in the Lakota language, as part of a project highlighting the formerly banned language.
Marvel announced the project on July 5 with a video showing the stars learning and delivering their lines in the Sioux tribes’ language alongside native speakers.
Mark Ruffalo, who portrays Bruce Banner/Hulk in the hit movie, helped organize the project, explained how the daunting task all came together.
“This project stemmed from my connection with the Lakota people,” explained Ruffalo, 56, in the video. “They had this fun idea to dub The Avengers in Lakota.”
The actor said he inspired to take part in the Lakota Project as a way to help revitalize the language, in part, because ‘there’s not a lot of people left who can speak it.’
The clip showed Ruffalo in the studio being delivered his lines in Lakota, and then trying to not only speak the words but act them out.
Some of the other cast members seen dubbing their lines included Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow) and Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), as well as some native speakers of the Lakota language.
One of the men involved in the Lakota Project maintains his ancestors were punished for speaking their own language, and as a result the speaking of the Lakota language ‘went underground.’
‘It was spoken only in bedrooms when the matrons weren’t there at the boarding schools,’ the unnamed man explained. ‘It was spoken in dark rooms where nobody could hear them, but it was still spoken.’
Another Lakota speaker added, ‘Our idea is to put the language back into the homes of their people, and to be able to have them bond in such a way that they’re having fun watching a movie and be totally integrated with the language of our people.’
‘Just getting everyone together on the same page is probably the most difficult thing, but everyone was into it,’ Ruffalo confessed.
‘It’s a daunting language,’ The Kids Are All Right star continued. ‘There are sounds that we just don’t have in our own language that they have in there’s. But once you get them it feels really good.’
‘It wasn’t just the dub, it was a recreation of The Avengers with the Lakota sensibility [and] the language,’ Ruffalo maintained. ‘I’m essentially acting with my other Native brothers and sister actors. And we’re acting these scenes in the Lakota language, and I have to act it too. I can’t just say the lines, it has to be acted.’
‘You have the most famous film franchise in the world and some of the famous actors, celebrities, and characters speaking our Lakota language that was once banned,’ one of the Native members of the project shared.
‘And so I think one of the more beautiful things from the project is out language doesn’t have to hide anymore.
Lakota, which is also referred to as Lakhota, Teton and Teton Sioux, is a Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people of the Sioux tribes, according to Wikipedia.
Lakota is mutually intelligible with the two dialects of the Dakota language, especially Western Dakota, and is one of the three major varieties of the Sioux language.
Like many indigenous languages, the Lakota language did not have a written form traditionally.
However, efforts to develop a written form of Lakota began, primarily through the work of Christian missionaries and linguists, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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