Indigenous Language Revitalization: How Education Can Help Reclaim “Sleeping” Languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 355-361
Author(s):  
Peter I. De Costa
Author(s):  
Toshiaki Furukawa

Scholars of language policy and planning (LPP) have recently started using ethnographic and discourse-analytic methods. Examining the collaborative sense-making activity of language users can shed light on how they construct their version or versions of reality by using semiotic resources, creating intertextual links, and referring to language ideologies. This study investigates an under-researched area in LPP: spoken discourse in media talk, specifically in media involved in indigenous language revitalization in Hawaiʻi. Using audio recordings of Ka Leo Hawaiʻi (The Hawaiian Voice) broadcast from the 1970s for over 25 years, the study explores the multilingual practices of the hosts, the guests, and the call-in listeners of the translingual contact zone of this Hawaiian language radio show by analyzing these participants' metapragmatic comments on the use of English and their bivalent utterances.


2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Hermes ◽  
Megan Bang ◽  
Ananda Marin

Endangered Indigenous languages have received little attention within the American educational research community. However, within Native American communities, language revitalization is pushing education beyond former iterations of culturally relevant curriculum and has the potential to radically alter how we understand culture and language in education. Situated within this gap, Mary Hermes, Megan Bang, and Ananda Marin consider the role of education for Indigenous languages and frame specific questions of Ojibwe revitalization as a part of the wider understanding of the context of community, language, and Indigenous knowledge production. Through a retrospective analysis of an interactive multimedia materials project, the authors present ways in which design research, retooled to fit the need of communities, may inform language revitalization efforts and assist with the evolution of community-based research design. Broadly aimed at educators, the praxis described in this article draws on community collaboration, knowledge production, and the evolution of a design within Indigenous language revitalization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Joshua Zwisler

Work in indigenous language revitalization often justifies itself along using one of two arguments: the intrinsic good of diversity and the importance of language in constructing indigenous identity. This article examines the second argument, first analyzing modern trends in the conception of indigenous identity and its link to language, and then uses two recent studies in indigenous language loss from South America and North America to determine the role of indigenous language in the production of indigenous identity. The result is that indigenous language serves as a linguistic mechanism of othering – the creation of an out-group with language as the criterion of exclusivity, and as a means of transmitting a romanticized image of indigenous people through indexicalizing such into indigenous language use. However, this article points out that the debate is far from over and that further research is need in the field of indigeneity and language.


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