Language endangerment is a fundamental issue for humanity. What rights do minority communities have concerning their languages? How does each language conceptualize the world differently? How much knowledge about the world and a local ecosystem is lost when a language disappears? What is the process involved and how can insights about this process contribute to linguistic theory? What typological insights will be lost if undescribed languages disappear before their unique structural properties are known? How can language shift be stopped or reversed? This volume comprises: * a general...
Language endangerment is a fundamental issue for humanity. What rights do minority communities have concerning their languages? How does each language...
Explores how and why languages become endangered, including a comprehensive new theoretical framework and a wide range of examples from around the world. The book will be welcomed by students and scholars of anthropology, linguistics and related disciplines, and by communities at risk of losing their heritage.
Explores how and why languages become endangered, including a comprehensive new theoretical framework and a wide range of examples from around the wor...