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18 - Contact and Shift: Colonization and Urbanization in the Arctic

from Part Four - Language Vitality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Lenore A. Grenoble
Edited by
Salikoko Mufwene  and
Anna Maria Escobar
Salikoko Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna Maria Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

For speakers of Arctic Indigenous languages, intense language contact has come as a result of colonization, leading to extensive shift and loss across different Arctic communities. Recent years have seen contact and shift intensified by a nexus of interrelated factors, or stressors, with urbanization, climate change, and the ongoing effects of colonization being among the most significant. The case study of the multilingual language ecologies in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia shows how these factors affect language vitality and overall wellbeing. Greenland provides a contrastive example as the local ecologies differ considerably. The net impact of stressors on Arctic Indigenous communities has been language shift, but the communities are currently experiencing widespread interest in and commitment to increasing language vitality and usage, a pan-Arctic movement of revitalization and resilience to build language and cultural sustainability.

Keywords

Arctic languagesshiftcolonizationurbanizationclimate changeSakha RepublicGreenland
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure
 , pp. 473 - 501
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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