Focusing on the Americas - home to 40 to 50 million Indigenous people - this book explores the history and current state of Indigenous language revitalization across this vast region. Complementary ...chapters on the USA and Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean, offer a panoramic view while tracing nuanced trajectories of "top down" (official) and "bottom up" (grass roots) language planning and policy initiatives. Authored by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, the book is organized around seven overarching themes: Policy and Politics; Processes of Language Shift and Revitalization; The Home-School-Community Interface; Local and Global Perspectives; Linguistic Human Rights; Revitalization Programs and Impacts; New Domains for Indigenous Languages
Providing a comprehensive, hemisphere-wide scholarly and practical source, this singular collection simultaneously fills a gap in the language revitalization literature and contributes to Indigenous language revitalization efforts.
Research into sustainable translanguaging has begun to address teacher and community concern around the use of translanguaging practices in the quest to revitalize and maintain vulnerable languages. ...The current article adds to this discussion through an empirical examination of translanguaging practices in te reo Māori and Samoan early childhood educational environments in New Zealand. Both communities have valid concerns and face their own challenges regarding protecting the vitality of these languages, and this has a major impact upon the work that we need to do to ensure we are making use of socially responsive translanguaging to support language revitalization and maintenance efforts.
The current article presents results of our school-based ethnographies with Māori and Samoan communities in the Wellington region of New Zealand 2017–2019, as well as the pedagogical translanguaging rules that we developed based on this research. We first present our findings of spontaneous translanguaging within these educational spaces. Then, we explain how we applied these findings to the creation of translingual teaching materials for these spaces. Finally, we discuss how these resources contribute to a socially responsive translanguaging pedagogy and the importance of this for marginalized communities.
Unpacking the possible ramification of how ownership of language and the responsibility of language revitalisation is perceived and how this may impact language revitalisation, this study uses a ...critical discourse studies approach to examine how the speakers negotiate their language ownership, which eventually leads to the question ‘who is responsible for language revitalisation’. The data of this study comes from semi‐structured interviews with 11 Indigenous participants in Taiwan. The findings suggest that, when deciding who can ‘do’ language revitalisation, only those who are deemed legitimate by the speakers have the power to act. However, the speakers view the non‐Indigenous speakers as potential speakers and, thus, were also assigned language revitalisation responsibility. Thus, by encouraging non‐Indigenous speakers to become speakers of an Indigenous language via language acquisition, language ownership is shared. This study shows the complexity of how the speakers negotiate language ownership and how this has an impact on language revitalisation efforts.
This paper introduces our special issue about ideologies in sign language vitality and revitalization and discusses ideologies related to the vitality of sign languages. Rather than taking for ...granted the notions of vitality and endangerment or developing criteria for measuring sign language vitality, the papers in this issue will provide a discursive construction of sign language endangerment. This construction in turn provides critical and historical reflection on how vitality has emerged as a concern for sign languages in specific local, national, and international contexts, the actors and institutions bringing forward this framing, and in whose interest it is to promote such discourses. The issue will survey how and by whom these ideologies are described, mobilized and legitimized, and what conceptualizations of language are emphasized and by whom.
Language revitalization as a linguistic social movement that aims to preserve and promote local languages, is experiencing a paradigm shift in Indonesia. These shifts can be seen from the aspect of ...language status objects. That is meant here is that the object of language status in language revitalization is not only languages with minority and endangered status. All local languages in Indonesia can be revitalized. Based on these conditions, this study explores the shift in the language revitalization paradigm in Indonesia. This aims to explain the structure of paradigm shift and provide an explanation for understanding language revitalization in its historical development in Indonesia. The study method uses qualitative methods with data collection techniques from the results of literature studies. Data analysis refers to Thomas Samuel Kuhn’s structure of the scientific revolution in terms of paradigm shift. As a result, the shift in the language revitalization paradigm in terms of the language status object is based on the heterogeneity of languages in Indonesia. Meanwhile, all languages in Indonesia must and have the right to be preserved in accordance with statutory regulations. This condition makes the government regulate language revitalization regulations that apply to all languages so that all languages in Indonesia receive the same treatment in the context of language preservation efforts.
Twenty-first century Bolivia witnessed indigenous resurgence and state promotion of indigenous languages. This article ethnographically examines the impact of these processes on indigenous language ...revitalization and ethnolinguistic identities in urban spaces. It reveals that language attrition continues because indigenous resurgence occurred at a time when language shift from Aymara to Spanish had already occurred in most households and schools were considered the spaces for learning Aymara. Moreover, although indigenous identity continues to be linked to language, linguistic proficiency no longer determines Aymara identity in a reductionist sense. Most contemporary Aymaras deploy a rhetoric that historically contextualizes the process of language attrition, thereby, asserting an anti-essentialist ethnolinguistic identity. This enables learning Aymara to be an aspiration that is highly valued but can be endlessly postponed. The article points out the limitations of state-led language revitalization policies and calls for creating synergies between state planning from above and communitarian initiatives from below.
This paper takes a pragmatic approach to the issue of language maintenance and revitalization and constructs its argument through an ecological lens. Electing Emilian – a minoritized language of ...Italy, as a case study, this article analyzes folk stories related to the more-than-human world. Employing an ecolinguistic framework and focusing on key theoretical concepts of evaluation, salience, and identity, this paper proposes that these folk stories can serve a dual purpose. Firstly, they can be used as materials to re-introduce the use of Emilian in the public domain by creating local spaces where the language can be spoken organically thus escaping the social stigma usually attached to it. This would help raise awareness of Emilian as a language intrinsically valuable. Secondly, by using these texts as materials, users would be exposed to new ways in which the local environment can be looked at and rediscovered. The results of the analyses are used to illustrate how ecolinguistics can be used to identify materials for language revitalization efforts in Emilian and other similar communities where the connection with heritage language, place, and identity is either partial or missing.
Este artículo analiza el tema de las lenguas indígenas y del pluralismo lingüístico en la Propuesta de Constitución Política de la República de Chile (2022), rechazada por amplio margen el 4 de ...septiembre del mismo año. Las normas elaboradas formaban parte de un conjunto más amplio de medidas ligadas a la plurinacionalidad, que estuvieron entre las que suscitaron mayor cuestionamiento por parte de la ciudadanía. En rigor, abordaremos detalladamente las propuestas relativas a las lenguas indígenas, para luego examinar sus condiciones de posibilidad de acuerdo con su situación sociolingüística y con las políticas estatales hacia las lenguas indígenas. Concluimos sosteniendo que las políticas plurilingües favorables a la revitalización de las lenguas indígenas sólo podrían tener éxito si son impulsadas activamente por los propios hablantes indígenas y con una política estatal capaz de abarcar todos los ámbitos, entre ellos la planificación formal y de estatus, la escuela y la comunidad, entre otros ámbitos.
PDF
