scholarly journals Language Documentation and Language Revitalization

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-219
Author(s):  
Peter K. Austin

The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in thirty-nine chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. Its purposes are (1) to provide a reasonably comprehensive reference volume, with the scope of the volume as a whole representing the breadth of the field; (2) to highlight both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it; and (3) to broaden understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, and, in so doing, to encourage and contribute to fresh thinking and new findings in support of endangered languages. The handbook is organized into five parts. Part I, Endangered Languages, addresses some of the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part II, Language Documentation provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part III, Language Revitalization encompasses a diverse range of topics, including approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping (“dormant”) languages. Part IV, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment. Part V, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.


Author(s):  
Lyle Campbell ◽  
Kenneth L. Rehg

The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages’ purposes are (1) to provide a reasonably comprehensive reference volume for endangered languages, with the scope of the volume as a whole representing the breadth of the field; (2) to highlight both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it; and (3) to broaden understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, and, in so doing, to encourage and contribute to fresh thinking and new findings in support of endangered languages. This chapter introduces the thirty-nine chapters of this Handbook, which are addressed to the themes and approaches in scholarship on endangered language and to these objectives of the book. The authors introduce the criteria for determining whether a language is endangered and just how endangered it is, address the causes of language endangerment, review the reasons for why the language endangerment crisis matters, and discuss the variety of responses to it.


Author(s):  
Lenore A. Grenoble

Linguists have become increasingly engaged in language documentation, working to record languages while they are still spoken. Speaker communities often turn to revitalization programs, attempting to strengthen the speaker base of their ancestral languages and make them vital again. This chapter addresses the factors that enter into the decision of what kind of revitalization to pursue and then discusses different kinds of models for language revitalization. It examines revitalization as a response to language endangerment, language attitudes, language domains and social networks, the role of the external linguist, and a successful revitalization in the case of the Hebrew language.


Author(s):  
Keren Rice ◽  
Nicholas Thieberger

A defining feature of new methods of documenting languages is the advance in technologies for recording, transcribing, annotating, managing, and analyzing language records, which then facilitates delivering that documentation for use in various forms, in particular for language revitalization efforts. It is the affordances offered by these new methods that have expanded the possibilities of language documentation to create richer records and enabling collaboration over distance, both between linguists and between linguists and speakers. Digital materials can serve multiple purposes, often unforeseen by the original recorder. Analog recordings had limited availability in single locations and access to timepoints within a recording was labor intensive and slow. Digital media on the other hand can be instantly accessed in many locations, and permits citation to the level of a word or even a phoneme and thus offers verification of analyses with reference to the primary recordings.


2022 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Maya Daurio ◽  
Mark Turin

In this teaching reflection, co-authored by an instructor and a teaching assistant, we consider some of the unanticipated openings for deeper engagement that the “pivot” to online teaching provided as we planned and then delivered an introductory course on Indigenous language documentation, conservation, and revitalization from September to December 2020. We engage with the fast-growing literature on the shift to online teaching and contribute to an emerging scholarship on language revitalization mediated by digital technologies that predates the global pandemic and will endure beyond it. Our commentary covers our preparation over the summer months of 2020 and our adaptation to an entirely online learning management system, including integrating what we had learned from educational resources, academic research, and colleagues. We highlight how we cultivated a learning environment centered around flexibility, compassion, and responsiveness, while acknowledging the challenges of this new arrangement for instructors and students alike. Finally, as we reflect on some of the productive aspects of the online teaching environment—including adaptable technologies, flipped classrooms, and the balance between synchronous and asynchronous class meetings—we ask which of these may be constructively incorporated into face-to-face classrooms when in-person teaching resumes once more.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Bidisha Bhattacharjee

Abstract Language is an integral part of the social identity and ethnicity of a community apart from being its mode of communication. Language plays a key role to preserve the history, culture and identity of a community. In this era of globalization, cultural and linguistic homogenization is a common trend. The state and dominant linguistic communities expect ‘others’ or the minority groups to assimilate into the dominant culture and language. Arguments for the maintenance and revitalization of minority and endangered languages have been made by many linguists around the world. Language rights, language planning and language documentation programmes are some steps taken by government and externally-funded organizations to protect endangered and indigenous languages. Besides the initiatives taken by the non-members of the community, the future of an endangered language and culture has been decided by the role and attitude of the community towards its community-specific linguistic and cultural identity. India is a very diverse country as far as its linguistic and cultural heritage is concerned. This project is enriched with insights from field experience in various districts of West Bengal, a state in India, where the speakers of endangered linguistic communities are aware of their linguistic rights and are highly engaged in the language and cultural revitalization, and in that their degree of progress and success is commendable. This paper aims at demonstrating the major role played by the communities themselves in language-revitalization programmes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Joanna Maryniak ◽  
Justyna Majerska-Sznajder ◽  
Tymoteusz Król

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen ◽  
Francisco Apurinã ◽  
Sidney Facundes

Abstract This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories. Analogous to the ways that speakers of many other languages who distinguish the entities that they talk to or about, the Apurinã make use of linguistic resources to establish the ways they interact with different entities. Besides these resources, the material means of mediating stories is a crucial tool to narrate the worlds of humans and nonhumans. Storytelling requires material mediation, and a specific context of plant substances. It also involves community meeting as a space of trust in order to become a communicative practice and effectively introduce the history of the people. Our sources are ethnography, language documentation, and autoethnography.


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