Will Indigenous Languages Survive?

Abstract

Much attention has been focused on the survival of Indigenous languages in recent years. Many, particularly anthropologists and linguists, anticipate the demise of the majority of Indigenous languages within this century and have called on the need to arrest the loss of languages. Opinions vary concerning the loss of language; some regard it as a hopeless cause, and others see language revitalization as a major responsibility of linguistics and kindred disciplines. To that end, this review explores efforts in language revitalization and documentation and the engagement with Indigenous peoples. It remains unclear why some attempts at language revitalization succeed, whereas others fail. What is clear is that the process is profoundly political. 293 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:293-315. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by Texas Christian University on 02/03/15. For personal use only.

The Relationship between Wellbeing and Indigenous Land, Language and Culture in Australia

“…The maintenance of Indigenous languages will require a significant proportion of those who are currently in young adulthood to learn an Indigenous language. Walsh (2005) identifies a number of ways in which this can occur, including the masterÁapprentice system (where an older speaker works on a one-to-one basis with a younger speaker), learning through schools, learning online, and immersion (living in a community of language speakers concurrently with formal instruction). As of 2008, about 8.3 per cent of the NATSISS sample was learning an Indigenous language.…”

Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life

“…4 While the academic literature has begun to criticize this approach (see Hill 2002;Moore 2006;Muehlmann 2012a;Walsh 2005), it has not examined how such metrics can enable certain forms of participation and foreclose others, how they can even increase tension across age cohorts who are differentially assessed in terms of linguistic competence. In the Yukon, assessment of fluency by age literally and figuratively marginalized younger individuals and aggravated their already thriving insecurity.…”

A new mechanism for science-policy transfer and biodiversity governance?

“…There are many levels in between (for example see Schultz et al 2007). These stakeholders differ at the very least in the sets of values (Gadgil 1995;Bawa & Gadgil 2003), in the languages and vocabularies (Maffi 2005;Walsh 2005), and knowledge systems (Agrawal 1995;Chambers & Gillespie Comment 2000;Toledo 2001) that they use in order to represent, understand and predict features of the natural environment in which they live, and in the processes they use to build trust and reach agreements (Herlihy & Leake 1997;Becker & Ghimire 2003;Folke et al 2005). Moreover, towards the local levels, ecological problems become dominated by the details of local context, making general recommendations less useful.…”