Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy and Revitalization

Description

Many of the world's languages have diminishing numbers of speakers and are in danger of falling silent. Around the globe, a large body of linguists are collaborating with members of indigenous communities to keep these languages alive. Mindful that their work will be used by future speech communities to learn, teach and revitalise their languages, scholars face new challenges in the way they gather materials and in the way they present their findings. This volume discusses current efforts to record, collect and archive endangered languages in traditional and new media that will support future language learners and speakers. Chapters are written by academics working in the field of language endangerment and also by indigenous people working 'at the coalface' of language support and maintenance. Keeping Languages Alive is a must-read for researchers in language documentation, language typology and linguistic anthropology.

Mari C. Jones is Reader in French Linguistics and Language Change at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in Modern and Medieval Languages at Peterhouse, Cambridge. A highly experienced fieldworker, she has published extensively on language obsolescence and revitalisation in relation to Insular and Continental Norman, Welsh and Breton. Her publications include Language Obsolescence and Revitalization (1998), Jersey Norman French (2001) and The Guernsey Norman French Translations of Thomas Martin (2008). Sarah Ogilvie works at Amazon Kindle on languages, dictionaries and content. Prior to that she was Reader in Linguistics at the Australian National University, Canberra. She lived and worked with an Australian Aboriginal community to write a grammar and dictionary of their language, and her current research focuses on how innovative technologies can help maintain and revitalise endangered languages. Her publications include Words of the World: A Global History of the OED (Cambridge, 2013).