Languages die for many reasons. Some are political. For example, many cultures have been colonized or otherwise dominated by another culture. Often, this translated into suppressing the native culture’s mother tongue and eventually the death of the language. For example, in the reading, when settlers were streaming west and displacing American Indians from their land, government policy created artificial conglomerates of tribes, jamming them into one place even though the groups spoke different languages and in many instances had little in common. The Siletz people were among the largest groups on the land their language prevailed over other tribes, and their culture was adopted by other tribes too. In addition, globalization currently is pushing for universal languages so many languages that have few speakers are more in danger. Losing a language also can mean losing crucial knowledge about the linguistic group’s history and culture. Many linguists who recognize the value of dying languages are working to preserve them. The Siletz were once considered a dead language and a dead tribe, but it was brought back into recognition. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary focuses on one of the most widely spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest. The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by the Living Tongues Institute, a nonprofit group, in partnership with the National Geographic Society — which helped start the Siletz dictionary project in 2005 and now uses it as a blueprint — are all centered on languages still in use, however small or threatened their populations of speakers may be. Many linguists helped to build this kind of dictionary and also start language classes for endangered languages.
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Are you aware of the reasons why linguists began to be interested by endangered languages? If the death of the language is political, then it probably is not an apolitical task to help revive or document it. If this linguistic movement began in the 50's or '60's it may have been linked to decolonization. If it was after that, it may have been a response to indigenous activism and people identifying themselves as their ethnicity as opposed to trying to assimilate to the mainstream culture. I haven't looked into it, but I would be interesting to know.