The rapid endangerment and death of many minority languages across the world is a matter of widespread concern, not only among linguists and anthropologists but among all concerned with issues of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized culture. By some counts, only 600 of the 6,000 or so languages in the world are 'safe' from the threat of extinction. A leading commentator and popular writer on language issues, David Crystal asks the fundamental question, 'Why is language death so important?', reviews the reasons for the current crisis, and investigates what is being done to reduce its impact. This 2002 book contains not only intelligent argument, but moving descriptions of the decline and demise of particular languages, and practical advice for anyone interested in pursuing the subject further.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. This text focuses on the question: what is lost when a language dies?

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts to bring their traditional languages back through educational programs, for some communities these efforts are not enough or have come too late to stem the tide of language death, which occurs when there are no remaining fluent speakers and the language is no longer used in regular communication. The Maliseet language, as spoken in the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, Canada, is one such endangered language that will either be revitalized and survive or will die off. Defying Maliseet Language Death is an ethnographic study by Bernard C. Perley, a member of this First Nation, that examines the role of the Maliseet language and its survival in Maliseet identity processes. Perley examines what is being done to keep the Maliseet language alive, who is actively involved in these processes, and how these two factors combine to promote Maliseet language survival. He also explores questions of identity, asking the important question: “If Maliseet is no longer spoken, are we still Maliseet?” This timely volume joins the dual issues of language survival and indigenous identity to present a unique perspective on the place of language within culture.

Don Kulick went to Papua New Guinea to understand why a language was dying. But that was just the beginning of what he learned. Renowned linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick first went to study the tiny jungle village of Gapun in New Guinea over thirty years ago to document how it was that their native language, Tayap, was dying. But you can’t study a language without settling in among the people, understanding how they speak every day, and even more, how they live. This book takes us inside the village as Kulick came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a swamp, in the middle of a tropical rainforest. These are fascinating, readable stories of what the people who live in that village eat for breakfast and how they sleep; about how villagers discipline their children, how they joke with one another, and how they swear at one another. Kulick tells us how villagers worship, how they argue, how they die. Finally, though, this is an illuminating look at the impact of white culture on the farthest reaches of the globe—and the story of why this anthropologist realized that he had to leave and give up his study of this language. Smart, engaging, and perceptive, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that will soon disappear forever.

Language death is an aspect of language contact which has occupied the interest of linguists from the past twenty-five years or so. Although the phenomenon of language death is occuring all over the world very few instances of it have been dealt with both from a sociolinguistic and formal linguistic standpoint. Those that spring to mind are the works of Nancy Dorian on East Sutherland Gaelic and Hans-Jürgen Sasse on the Albanian dialect of Arvanítika in Greece. In both instances it is dialects of languages that are treated and not complete languages themselves. The study of language death in the Isle of Man deals with the decline and extinction of Manx Gaelic as a community language, and as a language in its own right. After setting the scenario of language death this study then looks into the sociolinguistic reasons which led to the decline and death of Manx in Man. There then follows a detailed look into the study of language and language use in Man, from early observations to the present day. This section includes a detailed description of phonetic and sound recordings made of Manx over the period. This leads to an in-depth study into the formal linguistic situation of Manx, tracing the development in its phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morphosyntax and syntax, idiom and lexicon, which ultimately led to its demise. As language revival is in itself a facet of language death, the study concludes with a short excursus into the various efforts at language revival and maintenance in Man, from the latter part of the 19th century to the present day. The appendices include Professor Carl Marstrander's diary of his visits to Man (1929-33) published for the first time. The diary contains percipient observations of the state of Manx in its final phase. In short, this study looks in some detail into the mechanics of language death on a once thriving and vibrant community language.

Languages are dying at an alarming rate all over the world. Estimates range from 50% to as much as 90% by the end of the century. This collection of original papers tries to strike a balance between theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches to language death and language maintenance. It provides overviews of language endangerment in Africa, Eurasia, and the Greater Pacific Area. It also presents case studies of endangered languages from various language families. These descriptive case studies not only provide data on the degree of endangerment and the causes of language death, but also provide a general sociolinguistic and typological characterization the language(s) under discussion and the prospects of language maintenance (if any). The volume will be of interest to all those concerned with the ongoing extinction of the world’s linguistic diversity.

The aim of this book is to inform both scholars and the public about the nature and extent of the problem of language decline and death in Africa. It resourcefully traces the main causes and circumstances of language endangerment, the processes and extent of language shift and death, and the consequences of language loss to the continent's rich linguistic and cultural heritage. The book outlines some of the challenges that have emerged out of the situation.

The Brule Dwellers of Ascension Parish are descendants of Canary Island immigrants who came to Louisiana in the late 1700s. A few residents in and around the Ascension Parish area still speak an archaic dialect of Spanish which is at the brink of linguistic extinction. Because the Brule dialect is in the final stages of what is commonly known as “language death”, the case of Brule Spanish presents an exciting opportunity to investigate commonly held assumptions regarding the structural changes often associated with vestigial languages. Its relative isolation from other dialects of Spanish for over two hundred years serves as a sort of linguistic “time capsule” which provides information that is relevant to critical outstanding issues in Hispanic dialectology and historical linguistics. In addition to examining these issues, documenting the specific characteristics of Brule Spanish, and comparing Brule Spanish with other modern Spanish dialects, this book presents a very accessible introduction to the field of language death.