The literature on Indigenous language revitalization is dominated by sociolinguistic and normative approaches that focus on “the vitality of languages, the multiple facets of linguistic landscapes, and the effects of language policies on individuals and groups” (Sonntag and Cardinal, 2015: 6). Very little research, however, has been done using the tools of political science and public policy to analyze the emergence of language policies or the choices made by governments and organizations to protect, preserve and revitalize Indigenous languages. Using an historical institutionalist approach, this paper will examine the decline and revitalization of Manx Gaelic (Manx), the Indigenous language of the Isle of Man, a small island jurisdiction in the British Isles. Manx has been critically endangered for many decades, following its slow decline during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in recent years has undergone a process of revitalization spearheaded by civil society organizations in partnership with government. The chapter identifies and discusses the reasons why Manx went into decline and the opportunities and challenges associated with promoting and sustaining its revitalization.

Premiering at Perth Festival in 2020, Hecate is the first stage adaptation of Shakespearean work, in this case Macbeth, to be performed entirely in one Aboriginal language from Australia, specifically the Noongar language from Western Australia’s southwest. Australia is home to hundreds of Aboriginal languages, most of which are endangered due to settler-colonial suppression of Aboriginal culture. Today, although there are over 30,000 Noongar people, the Noongar language is rarely heard spoken in full sentences. More than being a significant artistic achievement, presenting Shakespeare in Noongar has provided a rare opportunity for Noongar and other people to actively engage with the Noongar language in deep and lasting ways. As a nation with a noted cultural cringe, Australia places high cultural value on Shakespeare. The opportunity to develop Hecate as a Noongar-language work arose because engaging with the English literary tradition – and particularly Shakespeare – attracted the necessary government and philanthropic support, media attention and audience interest. In Hecate, Shakespeare’s venerated status has been subversively used as a chink in the settler-colonial armour through which Noongar cultural activism, and deeper ‘felt’ intercultural understanding has been achieved via various collaborative processes, most importantly in developing a Noongar language-speaking ensemble of Noongar actors.

This chapter is about the evolution of language contact as a research area from the late nineteenth century to the present. It underscores the catalyst part that the discovery of creoles and pidgins by European philologists and other precursors of modern linguistics played in highlighting the roles of population movement and language contact as actuators of language change and speciation. It draws attention to the significance of the study of language evolution in European colonies in making evident the realities of language coexistence. These include the possible competition that can cause language shift and the death of one or some of the coexistent languages, a process that has affected competing European vernaculars faster than it has, for instance, Native American languages. It underscores the expansion of the field as linguists became interested in phenomena such as interference, codeswitching (or translanguaging), codemixing, diglossia, language diasporas, and linguistic areas, as well as factors that facilitate or favor the evolution of structures, sometimes of the same language, in divergent ways, owing to changes in population structures.

This chapter examines heritage languages in Japan and Korea, the two East Asian countries historically considered linguistically and culturally homogeneous. In consideration of the variation in conceptualizations of and approaches to heritage language, the current chapter adopts an inclusive understanding of the term “heritage language” and categorizes heritage language speakers as individuals with heritage connections and motivations, rather than limiting the designation to individuals who have a good command of the heritage language and are in regular contact with its speakers in familial and community contexts. The chapter then lays out the linguistic diversity and the patterns of language maintenance, shift, and revitalization in Japan and Korea. The chapter discusses ethnic Chinese immigrants and their settlement patterns in relation to language shift, and recent waves of immigrants and their languages in light of societal accommodations in Korea as an immigrant-receiving country. Implications of the findings and directions for future research and practice are suggested.

As a result of New Zealand’s colonial history, the indigenous Maori language was excluded from schooling (formally) and from a number of other language domains (informally) for over 100 years. By the late 1970s, Maori was considered an endangered language, heading towards extinction. In response, various grassroots Maori communities initiated Maori-medium education, which required, amongst other linguistic challenges, the rapid development of a corpus of terms to enable the teaching of all subjects in the Maori language. Eventually, Maori-medium schooling became state funded, which was accompanied by a requirement by the state agency which controlled education to standardize the corpus of terms for schooling. In this paper, we explore the challenges associated with the (re)development of te reo Maori in the 1980s and 1990s as an educationally standardized indigenous language in relation to one key curriculum area: pangarau (mathematics). This includes analysing the key role of top-down agents and agencies in the standardization of the pangarau lexicon and register. The chapter also examines the influence of the agents’ linguistic ideologies on subsequent corpus development that still determines the codification of terms thirty years later.