Full Description
This peer-reviewed collection brings together the latest research on language endangerment and language rights. It creates a vibrant, interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of the most pertinent and urgent topics central to vitality and equality of languages in today's globalised world. The novelty of the volume lies in the multifaceted view on the variety of dangers that languages face today, such as extinction through dwindling speaker populations and lack of adequate preservation policies or inequality in different social contexts (e.g. access to justice, education and research resources). There are examples of both loss and survival, and discussion of multiple factors that condition these two different outcomes. We pose and answer difficult questions such as whether forced interventions in preventing loss are always warranted or indeed viable. The emerging shared perspective is that of hope to inspire action towards improving the position of different languages and their speakers through research of this kind.
Contents
1. Foreword; 2. Introduction: Endangered languages and languages in danger (by Filipovic, Luna); 3. Section 1: Perspectives on endangerment: Ideology, language policy and language rights; 4. North-South relations in linguistic science: Collaboration or colonialism? (by Grinevald, Colette); 5. Indigenous language policies in Brazil: Training indigenous people as teachers and researchers (by Cabral, Ana Suelly Arruda Camara); 6. Language rights in danger: Access to justice and linguistic (in)equality in multilingual judicial contexts (by Hales, Liz); 7. Towards language planning for sign languages: Measuring endangerment and the treatment of British Sign Language (by Jones, Jill); 8. A cost-and-benefit approach to language loss (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.); 9. Section 2: Language documentation, ethno-history and language vitality; 10. Language documentation 20 years on (by Austin, Peter); 11. The brief existence of Saipan Carolinian: A study of a vanishing language storing valuable linguistic and historical insights on the tongue of its speakers (by Ellis, S. James); 12. Aikana and Kwaza: Their ethno-historical and sociolinguistic context in Rondonia, Brazil (by Voort, Hein van der); 13. Metaphors of an endangered forest people, the Yanomae (N. Brazil) (by Gomez, Gale Goodwin); 14. Measuring and understanding ethnolinguistic vitality in Papapana (by Smith, Ellen); 15. Section 3: Language transmission: Shift, loss and survival; 16. The art of losing: Beyond java, patois and postvernacular vitality - Repositioning the periphery in global Asian ecologies (by Lim, Lisa); 17. Reacting to language endangerment: The Akie of north-central Tanzania (by Heine, Bernd); 18. Language transmission and use in a bilingual setting in rural Tanzania: Findings from an in-depth study of Ngoni (by Rosendal, Tove); 19. Language shift and endangerment in urban and rural East Africa: Three case studies (by Gibson, Maik); 20. Redefining priorities, methods and standards in endangered-language lexicography: From lexical erosion in Palikur to areal lexicography (by Nemo, Francois); 21. Jewish language varieties: Loss and survival (by Spolsky, Bernard); 22. Index
