Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

10 results

  • 17 - Language Endangerment, Loss, and Reclamation Today

  • from Part Four - Language Vitality
  • Edited by Salikoko Mufwene, University of Chicago, Anna Maria Escobar, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
    Published online:
    02 June 2022
    Print publication:
    30 June 2022, pp 455-472

  • Summary

    Language endangerment and loss is a longstanding phenomenon affecting both non-contact languages and contact languages, but contact languages are particularly susceptible. This endangerment has greatly increased and sped up in the last century. Case studies of several languages in China and Thailand show that structural change is often more rapid during language shift. Tujia has been receding for millennia in central China; Gong may have originated during contact between speakers of a variety of Burmese and several local languages in western Thailand several hundred years ago. Several small groups in western China speak languages developed in contact between speakers of Mongolic languages, Tibetan, and Chinese in western China in garrisons set up from about 700 years ago on. The final part of this chapter discusses how communities may be assisted to react to the endangerment of their language. While linguists can document a language, it is only the speakers and the community who can decide and act to maintain it. Some of the problems leading to endangerment and the strategies to overcome them are briefly discussed.

  • 14 - Language Endangerment and Standardization

  • from Part III - Norms, Literacy and Education
  • Edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett, University of Cambridge, John Bellamy, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization
    Published online:
    01 July 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021, pp 397-420

  • Summary

    A significant proportion of the threatened idioms of the world are small, pre-literate languages spoken by communities encapsulated within modern ‘developed’ countries (e.g. Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand) whose dominant population uses a European competitor language of great prestige and wide currency. This acute asymmetry has been referred to by some Canadian indigenous leaders as characterizing the ‘Fourth World’ languages. Growing concern about the future of these languages has led to a focus on developing indigenous language literacy to prevent or even to reverse their loss. Focusing on the ‘standardization’ of the Innu language spoken in Quebec (Canada), this case study addresses the issue of whether standardization can actually foster literacy in the indigenous language and curtail (or even reverse) shift to the dominant language. The chapter discusses the process of orthographic standardization among the Innus as it unfolded in the past fifty years. It compares it with similar contexts across the world. A growing consensus emerges that standardization and literacy skills in indigenous languages cannot prevent language loss, and it is doubtful that it can foster the revitalization of the receding language.

  • 2 - Languages of Europe

  • Asya Pereltsvaig
  • Book:
    Languages of the World
    Published online:
    30 September 2020
    Print publication:
    03 September 2020, pp 43-74

  • Summary

    This chapter covers languages spoken in Europe, focusing primarily on the Indo-European languages. The internal classification of the Indo-European family is provided and the branches of the family that are represented in Europe are covered in detail. The discovery of the Indo-European family in the late 1700s and the continuing controversy surrounding the “homeland” of the Indo-European languages are discussed. A separate section is dedicated to non-Indo-European languages of Europe, with special focus on Basque, an isolate language. The final section delves into endangered languages of Europe.

  • Tibet's Invisible Languages and China's Language Endangerment Crisis: Lessons from the Gochang Language of Western Sichuan

  • Gerald Roche, Yudru Tsomu
  • Journal:
    The China Quarterly / Volume 233 / March 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 March 2018, pp. 186-210
    Print publication:
    March 2018

  • China is facing a language endangerment crisis, with half of its languages decreasing in number of speakers. This article contributes to the understanding of language endangerment in China with a case study of the Gochang language, which is spoken by about 10,000 Tibetans in western Sichuan. We describe Gochang as an “invisible” language – one that is overlooked by the state's ethnic and linguistic policies and thus is more vulnerable to the social transformations wrought by statist development. Using UNESCO's language vitality and endangerment framework to assess the endangerment of Gochang, we conclude that the language is “definitely endangered.” Our comparison of Gochang with other “invisible” languages in China shows that most are in a similar predicament, suggesting that China's language endangerment crisis is likely to continue unless these languages receive formal recognition or local governments take advantage of ambiguities in the policy framework to support them. The social impacts of a continuing, deepening language endangerment crisis in China are as yet unknown.

  • Notes

  • Edited by Rajend Mesthrie, University of Cape Town
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    06 October 2011, pp 430-439

  • Summary

    Language maintenance, shift, and endangerment are all outcomes of the dynamics of language communities. Language maintenance can be thought of as the survival of a language in a situation where it might be expected to be endangered. Fishman points out the issue of how language maintenance is to be secured and difficult to characterize. Language shift is in some sense the complement of language maintenance: it is what happens when a language is not maintained. The progression of a language into a new setting is traditionally characterized as occurring by migration, infiltration, or diffusion, depending on whether a whole speech community moves to a new location. Language documentation includes all potentially permanent recording of a language. The crucial aim of revitalization is to act positively on the process of transmission of a language from one generation to the next.

  • 12 - Archiving and language documentation

  • from Part II - Language documentation
  • Edited by Peter K. Austin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Julia Sallabank, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 March 2011, pp 235-254

  • Summary

    The field of language ecology studies the interrelationships between speakers and their languages as situated in their full (contemporary and historical) context. In its strong version, a theory of language ecology likens competition between languages to the competition between species and provides mechanisms for accounting for the survival of the fittest (languages). Language planning should take into account the overall language ecology of any group, which can be seen as a framework or model for analysing the relationship between linguistic practices on the context, or milieu, in which they are situated, that is, their ecolinguistic niche. Most linguists would argue that it is possible to place language vitality along a continuum, with languages which are vital and in no way endangered (e.g. English, Mandarin, and Spanish) on one end, and extinct languages which have no speakers and have vanished without descendent or daughter languages on the other end.

  • 10 - Speakers and language documentation

  • from Part II - Language documentation
  • Edited by Peter K. Austin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Julia Sallabank, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 March 2011, pp 187-211

  • Summary

    Language shift can take place rapidly, over a generation or two, or it can take place gradually, but continuously, over several generations. Linguists are becoming increasingly alarmed at the rate at which languages are going out of use. Overviews of the study of language endangerment usually start with a list of statistics about the number of languages in the world, the proportion considered endangered, and so on. Politics also plays an important part in language differentiation. Following nineteenth-century philosophers such as Herder, language has been considered a crucial element of national identity, with 'one state, one people, one language' being seen as the ideal. But languages do not necessarily follow political boundaries. The causes of language endangerment can be divided into four main categories such as: natural catastrophes, famine, disease; war and genocide; overt repression; and cultural/political/economic dominance.

  • 17 - Lexicography in endangered language communities

  • from Part III - Responses
  • Edited by Peter K. Austin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Julia Sallabank, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 March 2011, pp 337-353

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses important strands of thought regarding the interrelation of language and culture, from the complementary perspectives of culture's influence on linguistic form and the role of linguistic form in social action and culture. It begins with a discussion of the conceptual relationship between the two elements of the dyad. The study of linguistic form can be surveyed either from the perspective of organizational components or in terms of identifiable theories, the study of the language-culture nexus defies comprehensive exposition based on such rubrics. The ethnography of communication (EoC) was the earliest effort to develop a framework for the description of linguistic behaviour in wider social and cultural contexts. Recent publications on language endangerment aimed at popular audiences implicate the shift from local languages to global ones in significant losses of cultural knowledge, especially detailed knowledge of local environments and resource use.

  • 16 - Orthography development

  • from Part III - Responses
  • Edited by Peter K. Austin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Julia Sallabank, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 March 2011, pp 312-336

  • Summary

    This chapter addresses structural aspects of language endangerment from two perspectives: the contributions that the study of endangered languages make to typology and linguistic theory, and the structural consequences of language endangerment, including the kinds of changes that can take place in the phonology, morphology and syntax of endangered languages. Typology is closely associated with the study of linguistic universals, which can be understood as the common characteristics of the world's languages, usually with the goal of providing insight into the fundamental nature of human language. Though there are various ways in which languages can become extinct, the most typical is through language shift when a language gradually comes to have fewer and fewer speakers who use it in ever fewer domains until finally no one is able to speak it in any context. This process is sometimes called language obsolescence.

  • 14 - Language policy for endangered languages

  • from Part III - Responses
  • Edited by Peter K. Austin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Julia Sallabank, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 March 2011, pp 277-290

  • Summary

    This chapter outlines the state of endangerment across the world's languages, based on two recent comprehensive surveys (Brenzinger 2007a, Moseley 2007). It discusses some widely used scales for endangerment including the current UNESCO standard. Various widespread issues are outlined using examples from the situation in China, Burma/Myanmar and Thailand, based on original language survey data, to show the limitations of wide-scale surveys and the need for more finely grained survey work using a consistent methodology. Languages displaced by long-distance migration as an outcome of colonialism or more recent events are not usually listed as endangered if they are not endangered in some community location. In some areas, available overview data is both more comprehensive and has been collected using a more consistent methodology. Finally, the chapter discusses the general strategies and procedures for surveying language endangerment.