Endangered Languages
Language Loss and Community Response
Published on 13. March 1998
Book
Hardback
380 pages
978-0-521-59102-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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 TypologyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
18 Tables, unspecified
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
734 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-59102-7 (9780521591027)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Content
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 Kahnawa: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 Andre 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.