Language Hotspots: what (applied) linguistics and education should do about language endangerment in the twenty-first century

Abstract

I outline the concept of Language Hotspots, seeking to direct public and professional awareness of the global language extinction crisis. The loss of a single language leaves the science of linguistics impoverished and yet even few linguists realize that the vast majority of language families will likely be lost by the end of this century. Language Hotspots can serve as a focal point around which to develop a comprehensive approach to addressing how to increase, improve and coordinate engagement by all stakeholders in the global language extinction crisis, not only linguists and the communities undergoing language shift themselves, but also applied linguists, the general public and educators at all levels. I briefly outline language endangerment and its causes and detail the science behind the global Language Hotspots list, and then turn to an exemplification of an area of extreme linguistic endangerment, the Eastern Siberia Language Hotspot. Finally, I make a plea for linguistic scientists to increase their efforts in language documentation and for language education specialists to use their considerable skills and expertise to help support Indigenous movements in language revitalization. I then offer thoughts on why the Language Hotspots model should be incorporated into primary-, secondary- and postsecondary-level curricula.

Keywords:

• language endangerment
• endangered languages
• language shift
• language revitalization
• language documentation
• applied linguistics

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Lida Cope, Akira Yamamoto, Sally Rice, David Harrison, the attendees at the AAAL meeting in Atlanta and the audiences at Oberlin College and the University of Oklahoma, where previous versions of the paper were presented, for valuable feedback and comments, without whose input the final product would have greatly suffered. The author, of course, remains solely responsible for the data and conclusion herein.

Notes

1. Some sections of this paper represent slightly revised portions of a previous paper of mine (Anderson 2010).

2. In multilingual urban contexts, the construction of linguistic identities is extremely complex and varied. See Anchimbe (2007) for a recent discussion.

3. It is the diversity of language families that is encoded in the genetic index component of the Language Hotspot model (see the section ‘Language Hotspots’).

4. The rating of individual languages on a five-point scale of endangerment, averaged over an area, yields the endangerment index of a Language Hotspot.

5. The level of documentation of the languages of an area averaged is used to identify the documentation index of a Language Hotspot.

6. Basically, this encodes the probability of relatedness or lack thereof between any two randomly selected languages in the hotspot in question.

7. Of course, Romance and Germanic have been successfully placed in a larger secure taxonomic unit, i.e. the Indo-European language phylum. Note that many internal relationships that have been proposed to exist among the various recognized families of Indo-European remain controversial (except Indo-Iranian and maybe Balto-Slavic).

8. With some debate as to whether Sandawe and Khoe (along with the extinct and poorly attested Kwadi language) might form a higher-level unit of some sort, but one that would be larger than the level of genetic unit used here in the Language Hotspots model.

9. Some Language Hotspots are missing from the 2007 map, as this was intended to be a selection only (see Figure 1). Some but not all of these can be found on the Enduring Voices website map of the Language Hotspots (version 1.1) in Figure 2. A revised set of updated maps for all the Language Hotspots (version 2.0) is slated for release in early 2012.

10. Immersion schools coupled with some external (e.g. state) validation and financial support are where truly successful programs have been seen. This is, of course, difficult to impossible to come by for most endangered languages communities. Immersion schools are hardly a sure fire way to revitalize a language (see, e.g., Hickey 2007), but they are best among tried methods.

11. Today, the Matugar Panau Talking Dictionary is operational with nearly 3400 entries (http://matukar.swarthmore.edu). The community is scheduled to come online in 2011.