How do languages go extinct? Respond to the readings, and reflect on what happens when a language dies? How can linguists help preserve a language? Can a ‘dead’ language ever be brought back to life? What efforts are currently underway to document linguistic diversity?
The article "Tribe Revives Language on the Verge of extinction" explores the complicated reality of language vitality in the modern world of communications. The discussion surrounding a language, and how "alive" it is, is more nuanced than the number of people that speak it. Preservation of languages has so much to do with maintaining proper documentation and data of the given language. The article outlined how often schools and education was adversely affecting the preservation of native languages. The forced assimilation into Governmental boarding schools made the native tongue the enemy of appropriation into an American identity. Now the schools are allowing Siletz, the tribal language described in the article, to be reintegrated into schooling by offering it as a foreign language. While this is a stride towards lingual revival for the native tribe and against the death of the language, it is interesting rhetoric to reoffer the language in American school systems as "foreign languages" when it is quite literally the most native the language could be. The process of revival is long and complicated because it has to do with more than simply the re-education of the language, but also reintegration to be put into practice so that it is not lost. There is so much work being done in the realm of data archival work that can help document languages, but they rely on primary texts that don't exist in all corners of the world. I have also seen social media being used to promote indigenous languages, although there are some issues that come into play in terms of ethics of promotion of an indigenous population's language that has a lot to do with the intention.
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