PENDLETON — When Pendleton High School senior Seth Scott delivers a speech to the class of 2020, he will cover some of the traditional themes of this kind of oratory: nostalgia, resilience and potential.

And if he performs his speech successfully at the May 30 ceremony, almost everyone watching him will not be able to understand it without a translation in the ceremony program.

Scott was one of five seniors at Pendleton High School and Nixyaawii Community School to receive the Oregon Seal of Biliteracy, and the only one to attain it by learning Nez Perce.

In an interview, Scott was humble about his accomplishment, but Pendleton High School Principal Melissa Sandven will describe Scott as an important part of an effort to preserve a dying language.

But Scott, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, didn’t set out to be a standard bearer. He was looking for a class to help fill out his senior-year schedule and saw there was an opening in a language class. In what felt like a whirlwind process, Scott said he found himself agreeing to a request from his teacher to learn Nez Perce and take the biliteracy test.

“It’s been one big coincidence,” he said.

The Oregon Seal of Biliteracy has existed since 2016, but this is the first time the state has allowed Umatilla and Nez Perce to be included.

Scott was learning Weyíiletpuu, a Nez Perce dialect spoken by the Cayuse people, at a dangerous ebb in its existence, with only a handful of fluent speakers left among tribal members.

CTUIR tribal linguist Gretchen Kern has spent much of her academic career looking at complex languages, having studied Irish and Welsh on her way to earning a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After studying the Nez Perce language for a year, Kern said the tongue is not easy for first-time speakers to pick up.

“There’s a lot of nuance to be worked out,” she said.

Kern said there are strings of consonants and sounds that have no equivalent in English and the grammar system can be quite complex.

Further complicating the teaching process is that the Nez Perce dialect was almost entirely oral and the texts that do exist that translate English into Nez Perce are rare and ill-suited for beginners.

Going into the program, Scott said he had studied some Walla Walla in elementary school, but found Nez Perce to be incredibly different.

But he worked with Kern, Nez Perce master language teacher Antone Minthorn and the rest of the CTUIR Language Department and stuck it out long enough to pass the test.

His next test will come Saturday, when he will be asked to read a speech in his newly acquired language.

Scott admitted he was a little nervous to do the speech, worried that he might stumble over some of the dialect’s words. The speech was translated by the language department and further revised to simplify some of the words.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic means Scott won’t have to perform his speech in front of a live audience, but it will be seen on an internet livestream.

Scott plans to spend part of his speech talking about how the virus scrambled the class of 2020’s year, and how their perseverance will help lead them through the pandemic.

His spring has been pretty low key since the state shut down school facilities in March, having already completed his senior requirements by the time physical classes ended. He said he’s spent the ensuing months mostly at home or working at the McDonald’s at the Arrowhead Travel Plaza in Mission.

He doesn’t have firm post-graduation plans yet, but he may look into getting a job in the culinary arts, one of his other high school pursuits.

As Scott shared his experiences learning Nez Perce, Pendleton High School Assistant Principal Curt Thompson walked by and struck up a conversation.

Thompson was principal of Washington Elementary School when Scott was a student there, and the pair reunited when Thompson moved to the high school.

Thompson said the seal Scott earned was a sign of his potential, and eventually, Scott admitted that learning the little-spoken tongue could open some new doors in his future.