Preserving Languages or Language Ecologies? A Top-down Approach to Language Survival

Mühlhäusler, Peter

doi:10.2307/3623012

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This chapter describes the importance of dialectal variety. In this sense, it partly concurs with the criticism advanced by Mühlhäusler (1992Mühlhäusler ( , 2000 who emphasizes the importance of linguistic variety in the maintenance of more marginalized languages. Instead, many scholars have focused on the structure of a language in order to promote and revitalize it, neglecting the promotion of dialectal variation (Mühlhäusler 1992, 164).…”

Section: Dialectal Variations In Lexicon and On The Discourse Levelsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…However, a few scholars contest such claims and their reasons for doing so vary. For example, the creation of a single standard form of the language may reduce language variety (often depicted in the dialects spoken by the members of the minority group) (Mühlhäusler 1992). Such an artificial language can simply be rejected by the majority of speakers of a minority language and, thus, it can simply be a wasted effort (King 2011).…”

Section: Language Revitalization: Pros and Cons Of Literacy Chauvinismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

Siragusa¹

2017

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This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority's heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival movements. In addition to the more-theoretically oriented scopes, this book addresses all the actors involved in revival movements including activists, scholars, and policy makers, and opens a discussion on literacy and orality, and power and agency in the multiple relational aspects of written and oral practices. This study addresses issues common to language revival movements worldwide and will appeal to researchers of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, education and language policy, and culture studies.Laura Siragusa is a linguistic anthropologist working within a program on Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has co-edited a special issue on language sustainability for the journal Anthropologica and published miscellaneous articles on Vepsian matters in Sibirica, JEFUL , and Folklore.

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Section: Dialectal Variations In Lexicon and On The Discourse Levelsupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Language Revitalization: Pros and Cons Of Literacy Chauvinismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

Siragusa¹

2017

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“…Austin and Sallabank (2015) point out that the early emphasis on 'compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a language' has led documenters to focus on defining and describing individual languages in isolation with a narrow attention to what Woodbury (2011: 177) calls 'the ancestral code' , rather than documenting dynamic language practices and real-life interactions in their sociolinguistic context (see also Sugita 2007;Amery 2009;Childs et al 2014). By definition, endangered languages do not exist in isolation but are always spoken in relationships with other languages, varieties, codes, styles, registers, etc., in a complex linguistic ecology (Haugen 1972;Mühlhäusler 1992Mühlhäusler , 2000Calvet 2006). Grenoble (2011) has argued that linguists should aim to document language ecologies, not just what they define as individual languages or varieties (the ancestral 32.…”

Section: Critical Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language documentation 20 years on

Austin

2016

IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society

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“…However, what actually is at stake are complex linguistic ecologies with fuzzy external boundaries and intricate and overlapping internal groupings. This point has been made most emphatically in the work of Mühlhäusler (1992Mühlhäusler ( , 1996, and it is of utmost importance for all serious attempts to reverse language shift (Fishman 1991;2002, p. 147), but it also underlies the theme of "enumeration" discussed by Hill (2002, p. 127) and her commentators and the attempts to "factorize" assessments of language vitality.…”

Section: Rhetorical Challengesmentioning

confidence: 93%

Reproduction and Preservation of Linguistic Knowledge: Linguistics’ Response to Language Endangerment

Himmelmann

2008

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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In responding to the globally accelerating rate at which linguistic varieties are disappearing, structural linguistics is confronted with a number of challenges for which it is ill-equipped because of limitations in its basic conceptualization of linguistic knowledge. In addition to providing a brief history of the recent promotion of language endangerment to a major concern of the discipline as a whole, this article discusses three such challenges: (a) new demands on linguistic fieldwork practices, (b) rhetorical tensions arising from the need to address a multiplicity of audiences; (c) the limits of the traditional descriptive trilogy and its replacement by the concept of language documentation. On a theoretical level, these challenges are all linked to the problem that the structuralist conception of linguistic structures lacks adequate grounding in the social realities of the speech community, a problem that has accompanied linguistic structuralism since its inception. 337

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Preserving Languages or Language Ecologies? A Top-down Approach to Language Survival

Cited by 26 publications

References 6 publications

Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

Language documentation 20 years on

Reproduction and Preservation of Linguistic Knowledge: Linguistics’ Response to Language Endangerment

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