1st Edition
Endangered Languages in the 21st Century
Endangered Languages in the 21st Century provides research on endangered languages in the contemporary world, the challenges still to be faced, the work still to be done, and the methods and practices that have come to characterize efforts to revive and maintain disadvantaged indigenous languages around the world.
With contributions from scholars across the field, the book brings fresh data and insights to this imperative, but still relatively young, field of linguistics. While the studies acknowledge the threat of losing languages in an unprecedented way, they focus on cases that show resilience and explore paths to sustainable progress. The articles are also intended as a celebration of the 25 years’ work of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and as a parting gift to FEL’s founder and quarter-century chair, Nick Ostler.
This book will be informative for researchers, instructors, and specialists in the field of endangered languages. The book can also be useful for university graduate or undergraduate students, and language activists.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
List of contributors
1. Foreword and Introduction by David Crystal
Section I: General state of endangered languages today in some large regions of the world: some good news
2. Michael Walsh: The rise and rise of Australian languages
3. Sebastian Drude, Joshua Birchall, Ana Vilacy Galúcio Moreira, Denny Moore, Hein van der Voort: Endangered languages in Brazil in 2021
4. Hakim Elnazarov: Endangered languages of Central Asia: Challenges and prospects for development in the new millennium
5. Salem Mezhoud: They kill languages, don’t they? - a short chronicle of planned language death in North Africa
6. Mary Jane Norris & Robert Adcock: First- and second-language speakers in the home: an Indigenous Canadian perspective
Section II: Theoretical approaches - supporting language maintenance
7. M. Paul Lewis: Sustaining language use: Bridging the gap between language communities and linguists
8. David Bradley: Language endangerment: what it is, how to measure it and how to act
9. Tjeerd de Graaf: The use of historical material for the safeguarding of endangered languages
10. Riitta Valijärvi & Lily Kahn: The role of new media in endangered language communities
11. Eda Derhemi: Examining change in endangered languages with some reference to Arbëresh and Arvanitika
12. Christopher Moseley: Transnational languages in the Atlas of Endangered languages
13. Simon Musgrave & Nick Thieberger: Hypothetically speaking: Ethic in linguistic fieldwork, a provocation
Section III: Empirical studies: towards sustainable language maintenance and use
14. Rob Amery: Sustainable pathways for a fledgling language movement: the case of Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, South Australia
15. Bernard Spolsky: The fate of Jewish languages competing with revitalised Hebrew
16. Peter Austin: Making 2,180 pages more useful: the Diyari dictionary of Rev. J. G. Reuther
17. David Nash: An unusual kind of loanshift: loan homonyms in some Australian endangered languages
18. Maya David: Sindhi Hindhus – a diasporic community: determining reasons for language shift and aligning it with revitalisation strategies
19. Marleen Haboud & Fernando Ortega: The Waotedodo language and the effects of intense contact
Index
Biography
Eda Derhemi is Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. She has a PhD from this university, defended in 2003, on the topic of endangered Arbëresh in Italy. For over 20 years, she has conducted research and published on linguistic endangerment with primary focus on Arbëresh and Arvanitika.
Christopher Moseley is a teaching fellow in Estonian Language at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London, UK. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Atlas of the World’s Languages (with R.E. Asher, 3rd edition forthcoming) and has been the editor of the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing.
