Abstract
Among the many language islands produced by the expansion of Songhay out of the middle Niger valley, Korandje stands out for its geographical isolation and linguistic divergence. Confined ...since perhaps 1200 CE to a single Algerian oasis well over a thousand kilometres from any other Songhay-speaking community, its speakers have extensively reshaped their language and identity under the influence of North African norms, while nevertheless keeping the former clearly distinct. Yet, following the socioeconomic and political changes of the 20th century, the survival of Korandje is now in doubt, as speakers increasingly adopt speech norms and linguistic ideologies negotiated outside the oasis.
This paper investigates how and whether speakers of endangered languages employ variation as a stylistic resource to make social meaning and index their identities. The study is set in historically ...Creole-speaking communities in rural Louisiana, which have now shifted almost completely to English. The Americanization of Louisiana induced language shift, but also a shift to the Anglo-American racial binary which supplanted local constructs of ethnicity and race. The study crafts a historical-sociolinguistic account of this process of Americanization, examining how linguistic differentiation was enacted through the enregisterment of iconic ‘Creole’/‘French’ variants as indexical links to the ‘Black’/‘White’ racial binary. Today, to a very limited extent, some speakers of Louisiana Creole still consider some variants socially meaningful and employ them to stylistic ends. This depends especially on racial identity and the variant in question. Subject pronouns retain some indexical value, occasionally employed stylistically by speakers racialized as White. However, front vowel rounding has
: highly meaningful in the early-20
century, its social meaning has been lost resulting in synchronic personal-pattern variation. The paper ends by trying to reconcile classic studies of Language Death with contemporary variationist critique, answering recent calls for more nuanced approaches to sociolinguistic variation in threatened languages.
Local minority languages and dialects, through the local knowledge and expertise associated with them, can play major roles in analysing climate change and biodiversity loss, in facilitating ...community awareness of environmental crises and in setting up locally‐adapted resilience and sustainability strategies. While the situation and contribution of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples are of emblematic importance, the issue of the relationships between cultural and linguistic diversity and environmental awareness and protection does not solely concern peripheral highly‐specialized communities in specific ecosystems of the Global South, but constitutes a worldwide challenge, throughout all of the countries, whatever their geographical location, their economical development, or their political status. Environmental emergency and climate change resilience should therefore raise international awareness on the need to promote the survival and development of minority languages and dialects and to take into account their creativity and expertise in relation to the dynamics of their local environments.
Local languages and dialects are essential for nurturing connections with the environment, facilitating early perception of environmental modifications, monitoring these modifications, and adapting local processes and practices of environmental protection and management to climate change resilience, sustainability and food security. Environmental emergency and climate change resilience should raise awareness on the need to promote the survival and development of minority languages and to take into account the creativity and expertise of minority languages in relation to their local cultures and environments.
Significance
Around the world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken, most of them by small populations of speakers in the tropics. Globalization puts small languages at a disadvantage, but our ...understanding of the drivers and rate of language loss remains incomplete. When we tested key factors causing language attrition among Papua New Guinean students speaking 392 different indigenous languages, we found an unexpectedly rapid decline in their language skills compared to their parents and predicted further acceleration of language loss in the next generation. Language attrition was accompanied by decline in the traditional knowledge of nature among the students, pointing to an uncertain future for languages and biocultural knowledge in the most linguistically diverse place on Earth.
Papua New Guinea is home to >10% of the world’s languages and rich and varied biocultural knowledge, but the future of this diversity remains unclear. We measured language skills of 6,190 students speaking 392 languages (5.5% of the global total) and modeled their future trends using individual-level variables characterizing family language use, socioeconomic conditions, students’ skills, and language traits. This approach showed that only 58% of the students, compared to 91% of their parents, were fluent in indigenous languages, while the trends in key drivers of language skills (language use at home, proportion of mixed-language families, urbanization, students’ traditional skills) predicted accelerating decline of fluency to an estimated 26% in the next generation of students. Ethnobiological knowledge declined in close parallel with language skills. Varied medicinal plant uses known to the students speaking indigenous languages are replaced by a few, mostly nonnative species for the students speaking English or Tok Pisin, the national lingua franca. Most (88%) students want to teach indigenous language to their children. While crucial for keeping languages alive, this intention faces powerful external pressures as key factors (education, cash economy, road networks, and urbanization) associated with language attrition are valued in contemporary society.
Endangerment as a criterion for those behaviours that can potentially and potentially threaten the health and safety of individuals in the future is a criterion that considers the behaviour worthy of ...attention regardless of the outcome. This criterion can provide a comprehensive model in describing (wrongdoing or criminalization) behaviours against health and safety, according to the basic philosophical principles in the principle of injury by referring to possible injuries and their classification. This article seeks to answer the fundamental question of how and by what approach can a significant number of immunosuppressive behaviours be envisioned as a criterion of risk in criminal law by explaining the income based on the description of the risk criterion. It seems that the Iranian legislature, by dividing the legal instances of risky behaviours, not only deviates from the goals of systematic description, i.e. social safety, but also pays attention to the need to separate instances of error from crime and systematic possible degrees of risk in regulations and adjust the position of criminal law in ensuring safety and preventing risky behaviours.
The discovery of a rare fly in a North London cemetery marks my entry point into a wider reflection on the value and significance of urban biodiversity. Using different indices of ecological ...endangerment, along with a critical reading of new materialist insights, this paper explores the cultural, political, and scientific significance of saproxylic (rotten wood) invertebrate communities in an urban context. The paper brings the fields of urban ecology and post‐humanism into closer dialogue to illuminate aspects to urban nature that have not been systematically explored within existing analytical frameworks. We consider a series of intersecting worlds, both human and non‐human, as part of a glimpse into saproxylic dimensions to urban nature under a putative transition to a new geo‐environmental epoch.
The discovery of a rare fly in a North London cemetery marks my entry point into a wider reflection on the value and significance of urban biodiversity. Using different indices of ecological endangerment, along with a critical reading of new materialist insights, this paper explores the cultural, political, and scientific significance of saproxylic (rotten wood) invertebrate communities in an urban context. We consider a series of intersecting worlds, both human and non‐human, as part of a glimpse into saproxylic dimensions to urban nature under a putative transition to a new geo‐environmental epoch.
This book is a detailed study of contact-induced change in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Jews of Sanandaj, a town in western Iran. Since its foundation in early 17th century, the city has been home ...to a significant Jewish community. The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of the town displays different historical layers of contact with various Iranian languages over the course of many centuries. The Iranian languages in question are Gorani, Kurdish, and Persian. Among these, Gorani has had a particularly deep impact on Jewish Neo-Aramaic, whereas the impact of Kurdish, and especially Persian, remains superficial. Jewish Neo-Aramaic records a history of language shift from Gorani to Kurdish in the region. The book offers insights into contact-induced change in social contexts in which a language is maintained as a demarcation of communal identity in a multilingual setting. ; This book is a detailed study of contact-induced change in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Jews of Sanandaj, a town in western Iran. Since its foundation in early 17th century, the city has been home to a significant Jewish community. The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of the town displays different historical layers of contact with various Iranian languages over the course of many centuries. The Iranian languages in question are Gorani, Kurdish, and Persian. Among these, Gorani has had a particularly deep impact on Jewish Neo-Aramaic, whereas the impact of Kurdish, and especially Persian, remains superficial. Jewish Neo-Aramaic records a history of language shift from Gorani to Kurdish in the region. The book offers insights into contact-induced change in social contexts in which a language is maintained as a demarcation of communal identity in a multilingual setting.
One critical assumption that Salikoko Mufwene (2017) makes about the field of language endangerment and loss is that linguists engaged in language endangerment, documentation, and revitalization are ...concerned with indigenous languages, which naturally leaves out nonindigenous languages. This response concerns itself with addressing this assumption, with a focus on a particular group of nonindigenous languages. It provides insight on the levels of endangerment of pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages for which we have information, and considers some reasons why it is important to focus on the endangerment and loss of these types of nonindigenous languages.
This paper employs a case study with Amdo Tibetan children to demonstrate the benefits of narrative elicitation for ethnographic language socialization research in under-studied languages. Primarily ...by examining spontaneous verbal interaction, existing language socialization research has demonstrated how salient grammatical resources shape children's understanding of cultural belief systems pertaining to sociality and the appropriate display of emotion. However, spontaneous data do not always capture children's full linguistic repertoires and competencies, and may therefore present a partial picture of their mastery over particular grammatical systems. One such area that remains to be studied is how children use interactional cues to build their emerging knowledge of grammatical perspective marking in Tibetan languages. This paper integrates narrative elicitation with ethnographic methods from language socialization to examine how Amdo Tibetan children mark perspective using evidentiality, the grammatically-obligatory encoding of knowledge source, an area not frequently documented in language socialization studies. Language socialization research involved 15-months of participant observation, audio-video recording, and analysis of spontaneous interactions with children aged 1–4. This ethnographic research found that adults' narratives highlighted local theories about the importance of compassion (Tib.
snying rje
) by using grammatical evidentiality to emphasize characters' direct experiences in the story-world. However, grammatical evidentiality was under-represented in children's spontaneous talk. To provide further insight into children's mastery of evidentiality in this culturally salient communicative genre, I conducted narrative elicitation tasks with seven Amdo Tibetan children, aged 2–7. By framing narrative elicitation tasks as forums for social interaction in family homes, I adapted a method traditionally used in experimentation to complement the study of naturalistic interaction. Interaction analysis of the elicited narratives found that family members positioned young children as novice narrators, leading to dialogic rather than monologic narratives. Young children co-constructed shared perspectives on narrated events, and used evidentiality in conventionalized ways by mirroring the grammatical forms of adults' previous utterances. By adapting narrative elicitation tasks to language socialization's ethnographic methods, this paper models how qualitative researchers can locate patterns in children's experiences of language across complementary settings of data collection, an endeavor that is particularly important to research with child speakers of under-documented languages.
As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises ...is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to connect the subject matter to language evolution in general, the framing of LEL as deleterious almost exclusively to ‘indigenous peoples’, a lack of historical time depth, and the omission of the ecological factors in typical approaches to LEL, I argue that linguistics should theorize about language vitality more adequately than has been the case to date.
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