That had puzzled Amy Crowell, who studied Arapaho at the University of Wyoming. Then she went for a hike. She noticed things – like the way the pine tree needles contained hues of both green and blue. The world started opening a little.

“[The language] has helped me to understand the world in a different way,” Crowell says.

Across the country, college students have an ever-increasing array of languages available for study, from Japanese to American Sign Language to Farsi. And in the past two decades, the United States’ own indigenous languages – Navajo, Ojibwe, Apache and hundreds of others – have taken up residence among their “foreign” language counterparts in some universities and tribal colleges.

While nearly 80 universities and tribal colleges offer Native American studies majors, according to the College Board, just five colleges – Diné College, Idaho State University, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia (the latter two in Canada) offer majors in Native American languages.

In some cases, offering Native language programs at the university level is a last-ditch attempt to save the languages from extinction. Worldwide, linguists estimate that half of the world’s 6,000 languages will disappear within 100 years. Experts say that because the majority of native language speakers are passing away, almost all of these languages could be gone by 2050.

In the United States, languages such as Kutenai, Mandan or Osage, are now spoken only by a handful of elders – in some cases, only one person.

Native language courses vary from school to school. At the University of Wyoming, Crowell’s class was taught by an elder who spoke fluent Arapaho. Students there progress from beginning to intermediate to advanced levels, and eventually advanced students teach beginning students. The course is based on a native tradition of teaching, Crowell says.