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Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 117-128

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Language learning and teaching of endangered languages have many features and needs that are quite different from the teaching of world languages. Groups whose languages are endangered try to turn language loss around; many new language teaching and learning strategies are emerging, to suit the special needs and goals of language revitalization. The teaching of 'foreign languages', 'majority languages', 'heritage languages' and endangered languages is compared in this paper. Because of the paucity of language teaching resources for endangered languages, and especially because of the special goals of learning for language revitalization, individuals and communities and the professionals who work with them are developing novel ways of teaching and learning their ancestral language, to meet the goals of language learners and their communities.

This chapter surveys developments in language revitalization, a movement that dates approximately from the 1990s and builds on prior work on language maintenance (see Fishman, 1991; 2001) and language death (Dorian, 1981; 1989). Focusing on indigenous languages, it discusses the role and nature of appropriate linguistic documentation, possibilities for bilingual education, and methods of promoting oral fluency and intergenerational transmission in affected languages. Various avenues for language revitalization, a proactive approach to the continued use of a particular language, are then described (see Hinton & Hale, 2001). In contrast to the smaller minority languages of Europe that have long literary traditions, many indigenous languages in the Americas and elsewhere are solely or primarily oral languages; thus, revitalization efforts aim to promote conversational fluency among speakers in a community. Related literature falls into four main categories: (a) theoretical and empirical works on language revitalization; (b) applied works on revitalization in practice; (c) pedagogical and reference publications; and (d) legal documents that support or impede revitalization of languages. Recent examples of current literature in each category are reviewed.