Ecological Perspectives on Language Endangerment and Loss

This book discusses various issues arising from the dominant discourse on language endangerment and loss in linguistics. Are the terms mother tongue, heritage language, and ancestral language interchangeable? Does a child receiving formal education in a mother tongue different from that or those of his/her parents lose a culture that he/she should otherwise inherit? Is a language separate from the culture in which its speakers evolve and it is being practiced? Thus, is a population shifting to a dominant language necessarily abandoning its traditional culture ipso facto or is it also reshaping it along with that associated with the new language into a new, mixed culture? Are cultures intended to be static? Must speakers of particular languages be wedded to them in the same way they are to their genes? What can we learn about language shift, language vitality, and human adaptiveness from the protracted history of mankind? These and a host of other issues regarding the intertwining of colonization, globalization, language, and culture are discussed in this book, inviting linguists and other interested scholars to be critical participants in the current debate.

Discusses relevant issues in language endangerment and loss Offers an ecological linguistic perspective on globalization, culture, language education, and human adaptiveness Informed by the history of mankind the author encourages a critical approach to the dominant discourse

Autorentext

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service professor in the Departments of Linguistics and of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, at the University of Chicago. His research area is evolutionary linguistics focused as much on the phylogenetic emergence of language as on the differential evolution of modern languages in colonial and post-colonial contact ecologies, including the birth of new language varieties as well as the spread of some, the endangerment or loss of some others, and the resilience of some minority languages. His approach is inspired by macroecology and population genetics. He is the author and editor of several books and hundreds of other essays.

Inhalt

1. What is a language?.- 2. The meaning of language endangerment and loss.- 3. A history of the world from the point of view of language vitality.- 4. Language diversification vs. language loss.- 5. Education in mother tongue but not necessarily in one's heritage language.