Efforts to revitalize languages are situated within the wider context of efforts to maintain and revitalize intangible expressions of culture more broadly, from music to dance to ritual and ceremonial traditions. In some ways, language revitalization efforts are considerably further advanced in both theory and practice than those relating to other cultural expressions. Taking music as a example, this chapter draws together the scholarly field of language revitalization with the growing investigations into music sustainability, making the case for close collaboration between sociolinguists and applied ethnomusicologists on these issues. It argues three main reasons: first, that collaboration will help consolidate a common language to describe and discuss the issues; second, that it will advance theoretical frameworks and tools to support our combined efforts; and third, it will strengthen advocacy around the need for revitalisation efforts, in the community, scholarly, and public spheres. From its beginnings in the late 19 th century until the mid-20 th century, the discipline of ethnomusicology (or, as it was then called, 'comparative musicology') placed key importance on capturing the sounds of 'dying' cultures before they disappeared. In this pursuit, it was informed and influenced by research activity and interest in other disciplines, including sociolinguistics and anthropology. But from around mid-century, the attitudes of music researchers toward issues of musical loss and change began to shift considerably. By the early 1990s, music preservation interests had fallen out of favor, with many ethnomusicologists holding view that 'salvage' or 'white knight' efforts to 'save' dying music genres were overly romanticized, neo-colonial and paternalistic. By comparison, this was around the time when, in an extended article in the journal Language, Ken Hale and his colleagues "attempt to represent as forcefully as we can. .. the reality of language loss and decline as a condition of the modern world" (Hale et al, 1992, p. 2), and to argue for the relevance of linguistics and linguists in responding and This is an author-produced PDF of an invited contribution to the Handbook of Language Revitalization, copyright Routledge. The citation information is: Grant, C. (2017). A case for greater interdisciplinary collaboration in language and music revitalization. In L. Huss & G. Roche (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (pp. 236-244). Routledge.
