Although the Channel Islands have been united politically with Great Britain since 1204, each of the four largest islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney, feature Norman dialects, known locally as Jèrriais, Guernésiais, Sercquiais and Aurignais. For many centuries, these were the main everyday languages of most islanders, and Jèrriais and Guernésiais enjoy a literary tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. Owing to the spread of English throughout the archipelago during the twentieth century in particular, the dialects have all suffered a sharp decline in speaker numbers, with the Norman of Alderney now extinct. The insular varieties are not homogeneous and the linguistic consequences, both lexical and structural, of the extensive language contact between English and the three surviving dialects have served to further differentiate insular Norman from the Norman varieties spoken in mainland Normandy. The realisation that insular Norman is declining rapidly in terms of speaker numbers has prompted the establishment of local language planning measures, currently more established in Jersey than on the other islands.

This chapter considers the history, political context, and linguistic characteristics of Scottish Gaelic. Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland since approximately 400 CE and was a majority language of Scotland around 1000 CE. Today, Gaelic is a minority, endangered language undergoing revitalisation. Currently, there are around 58,000 speakers in Scotland, and 1,500 in Canada. Around half of speakers in Scotland live in the north-west Highlands and islands, but many also live in Lowland cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh due to migration and revitalisation policies. Gaelic’s linguistic features are substantially different from English and, along with other Celtic languages, are quite different from many other Indo-European languages. For example, Gaelic is a VSO language and retains morphological complexity such as case and gender. Phonological features include contrastive palatalisation, pre-aspiration, and some dialects have lexical pitch accents. In some morphophonological contexts, consonants undergo mutation. Recent sociolinguistic developments including language revitalisation have led to new linguistic structures emerging. This chapter outlines some of these developments such as new varieties of Gaelic in urban settings, and dialect levelling in traditional areas among Gaelic-immersion school pupils.

Premiering at Perth Festival in 2020, Hecate is the first stage adaptation of Shakespearean work, in this case Macbeth, to be performed entirely in one Aboriginal language from Australia, specifically the Noongar language from Western Australia’s southwest. Australia is home to hundreds of Aboriginal languages, most of which are endangered due to settler-colonial suppression of Aboriginal culture. Today, although there are over 30,000 Noongar people, the Noongar language is rarely heard spoken in full sentences. More than being a significant artistic achievement, presenting Shakespeare in Noongar has provided a rare opportunity for Noongar and other people to actively engage with the Noongar language in deep and lasting ways. As a nation with a noted cultural cringe, Australia places high cultural value on Shakespeare. The opportunity to develop Hecate as a Noongar-language work arose because engaging with the English literary tradition – and particularly Shakespeare – attracted the necessary government and philanthropic support, media attention and audience interest. In Hecate, Shakespeare’s venerated status has been subversively used as a chink in the settler-colonial armour through which Noongar cultural activism, and deeper ‘felt’ intercultural understanding has been achieved via various collaborative processes, most importantly in developing a Noongar language-speaking ensemble of Noongar actors.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) aims to help learners meet “present and future real-world communicative needs” (Long, 2015: 68). In Indigenous language revitalisation contexts, however, there may not be a real-world need to speak the target language, due to a lack of speakers or the widespread bilingualism associated with particular stages of language loss. Drawing on two distinct but complementary contexts, Macuiltianguis Zapotec after-school lessons (Oaxaca, Mexico) and a workshop for teachers at a Salish Qlispe immersion school (Montana, United States), we show how TBLT might be adapted for language revitalisation through the conscious creation of new spaces for meaningful communication in the target language. The Zapotec and Salish contexts represent different approaches to adapting TBLT for Indigenous language instruction. The Zapotec teachers looked for everyday communicative tasks that learners plausibly could do in Zapotec, focusing on encouraging students to speak Zapotec in situations in which they were already interacting with Zapotec speakers in the community but doing so in Spanish. The Salish teachers, on the other hand, focused on the school itself as a new space for meaningful language use. We describe how task-based methodological principles (Long, 2009, 2015) were useful for planning and teaching in these settings.