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Presents an overview of the living, endangered, and extinct languages of the world, providing the total number of speakers of the language, its history, and maps of the geographic areas where it is presently spoken or where it was spoken in the past.
It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information.
Minority languages are abandoned as people switch to larger languages and governments promote linguistic unity. This volume examines beliefs about endangered languages among speakers and linguists, which have important implications for preserving endangered languages, as well as for language policy at local, national and international levels.
Explores current efforts to record, collect and archive endangered languages which are in danger of falling silent.
Written by leading international scholars and activists, this guidebook provides ideas and strategies to support language revitalization.
Most societies in today's world are multilingual. 'Language contact' occurs when speakers of different languages interact and their languages influence each other. This book is an introduction to the subject, covering individual and societal multilingualism, the acquisition of two or more languages from birth, second language acquisition in adulthood, language change, linguistic typology, language processing and the structure of the language faculty. It explains the effects of multilingualism on society and language policy, as well as the consequences that long-term bilingualism within communities can have for the structure of languages. Drawing on the author's own first-hand observations of child and adult bilingualism, the book provides a clear analysis of such phenomena as language convergence, grammatical borrowing, and mixed languages.
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This is a National Foreign Language Resource Center conference volume and special issue of Language Documentation and Conservation, an open-access journal (http: //nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/).
Language documentation, also often called documentary linguistics, is a relatively new subfield in linguistics which has emerged in part as a response to the pressing need for collecting, describing, and archiving material on the increasing number of endangered languages. The present book details the most recent developments in this rapidly developing field with papers written by linguists primarily based in academic institutions in North America, although many conduct their fieldwork elsewhere. The articles in this volume — position papers and case studies — focus on some of the most critical issues in the field. These include (1) the nature of contributions to linguistic theory and method provided by documentary linguistics, including the content appropriate for documentation; (2) the impact and demands of technology in documentation; (3) matters of practice in collaborations among linguists and communities, and in the necessary training of students and community members to conduct documentation activities; and (4) the ethical issues involved in documentary linguistics.