Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response

Cambridge University Press, 3/26/1998
EAN 9780521591027, ISBN10: 0521591023

Hardcover, 380 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm
Language: English

This book provides an overview of the issues surrounding language loss. It brings together work by theoretical linguists, field linguists, and non-linguist members of minority communities to provide an integrated view of how language is lost, from sociological and economic as well as from linguistic perspectives. The contributions to the volume fall into four categories. The chapters by Dorian and Grenoble and Whaley provide an overview of language endangerment. Grinevald, England, Jacobs, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer describe the situation confronting threatened languages from both a linguistic and sociological perspective. The understudied issue of what (beyond a linguistic system) can be lost as a language ceases to be spoken is addressed by Mithun, Hale, Jocks, and Woodbury. In the last section, Kapanga, Myers-Scotton, and Vakhtin consider the linguistic processes which underlie language attrition.

Preface
List of abbreviations and symbols
Part I. General Issues
1. Western language ideologies and small-language prospects Nancy C. Dorian
2. Toward a typology of language endangerment Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley
Part II. Language-Community Responses
3. Technical, emotional, and ideological issues in reversing language shift
examples from Southeast Alaska Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer
4. Mayan efforts toward language preservation Nora C. England
5. A chronology of Mohawk language instruction at Kahnawà:ke Kaia'titahkhe Annette Jacobs
6. Language endangerment in South America
a programmatic approach Colette Grinevald
Part III. What is Lost
Language Diversity
7. The significance of diversity in language endangerment and preservation Marianne Mithun
8. On endangered languages and the importance of linguistic diversity Ken Hale
9. Living words and cartoon translations
longhouse 'texts' and the limitations of English Christopher Jocks
10. Documenting rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive loss in language shift Anthony C. Woodbury
Part IV. Mechanisms of Language Loss
11. Impact of language variation and accommodation theory on language maintenance
an analysis of Shaba Swahili André Kapanga
12. A way to dusty death
the Matrix language turnover hypothesis Carol Myers-Scotton
13. Copper Island Aleut
a case of language 'resurrection' Nikolai Vakhtin
Appendix
References
Index of languages
Index of names
General index.

"This fine collection of papers is a worthy addition to the literature on language endangerment and obsolescence, which has been growing exponentially in recent years. For anyone interested in language contact, language obsolescence, and language shift (death), Endangered Languages is filled with much of value on this topical and important subject. Grenoble and Whaley are to be sincerely thanked for editing this collection." Anthropological Linguistics "This volume is a vital addition to the literature supporting this important and growing movement within the field of linguistics and indigenous communities." Leanne Hinton, Language in Society "...to approach this collection from the standpoint of a linguistic typologist is an enlightening task in itself: it forces a constructive engagement with material that the authors have put together with other ends in view...most of the contributions contain lingusitic descriptions, as illustations or evidence, which are detailed enough to interest formal analysts of linguistic diversity in their own right." Linguistic Typology