For speakers of Arctic Indigenous languages, intense language contact has come as a result of colonization, leading to extensive shift and loss across different Arctic communities. Recent years have seen contact and shift intensified by a nexus of interrelated factors, or stressors, with urbanization, climate change, and the ongoing effects of colonization being among the most significant. The case study of the multilingual language ecologies in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia shows how these factors affect language vitality and overall wellbeing. Greenland provides a contrastive example as the local ecologies differ considerably. The net impact of stressors on Arctic Indigenous communities has been language shift, but the communities are currently experiencing widespread interest in and commitment to increasing language vitality and usage, a pan-Arctic movement of revitalization and resilience to build language and cultural sustainability.

This chapter considers motivations for engaging in language revitalization efforts. These encompass a range of physical, social and psychological factors, including connecting with ancestors, the past, and cultural heritage; healing from personal or historical trauma; building community; knowledge and culture; well-being; and the cognitive benefits of mother-tongue education and multilingualism. Case studies explore the impact of revitalization on physical health and well-being in Okinawa, Japan; the community benefits of a participatory action research project in the Black Tai (Lao Song) community in Thailand; language revitalization benefits in Wymysiöeryś (Wilamowice, Poland). In this case older people, who had been persecuted, were able to connect with young people through rehabilitation activities and community events, improving well-being and leading to positive language attitudes. Finally, Nahuatl identity and prestige have been strengthened through a series of workshops in which native speakers and new speakers could read and discuss colonial Nahuatl documents written by their ancestors.

Introduction

Over the past fifty years and with increasing frequency, innovative programs have appeared around the world with the aim of revitalizing languages that are at risk of disappearing due to declining numbers of native speakers. The nature of these initiatives varies as greatly as the languages that are their targets. In some instances, they are nearly national in scope, such as the efforts to preserve Irish, yet in other instances they involve small communities or even a handful of motivated individuals. Many of these programs are connected to claims of territorial sovereignty, though cultural sovereignty or a desire to maintain a unique ethnic identity is just as often the explicit goal. While in one context a revitalization effort may be centered around formal education, in another it may be focused on creating environments in which the language can be used on a regular basis.

Although tremendous variety characterizes the methods of and motives for reinvigorating languages, revitalization, as a general phenomenon, is growing and has become an issue of global proportion. There are now hundreds of endangered languages, and there are few regions of the world where one will not find at least nascent attempts at language revitalization. This comes as little surprise when considered in light of the confluence of several socio-historical factors. First, language death and moribundity (i.e. the cessation of children learning a language) are occurring at an exceptionally rapid rate.

This chapter provides a step-by-step account of how a community interested in revitalizing a language can assess its needs, commitment, resources, and goals, and then, based on these factors, how they can go about establishing the appropriate language program.

Preliminaries

Before beginning a revitalization program, we recommend as full an assessment as possible of resources available for the program, the status of the language, numbers of speakers, levels of knowledge of the language, levels of multilingualism, literacy, and so on. It should also cover an evaluation of community support, goals, and values, and the relationship with government agencies, including possible sources of financial support and relevant legislation. We recognize that a thorough assessment may take years to complete, and therefore may not be feasible in many cases of language revitalization, but some sort of preliminary assessment is needed in every community.

Assessment of resources

In the initial planning stages of any language revitalization program, it is important to identify the resources available to the program. In order to write about them more clearly, we have divided them into three categories: (1) financial resources; (2) language resources; and (3) human or emotional resources. By financial resources we mean the sources of money available within the community, the likelihood of obtaining external funding (from the federal government or humanitarian organizations, for example), as well as the kinds of resources available for education and programming, the use of media, etc. Language resources include access to existing language materials, such as grammatical descriptions and dictionaries, textbooks, pedagogical materials, written and oral literatures, and so on.

This book is designed for readers of various backgrounds who are interested in the fate of small language communities around the globe: linguists, anthropologists, and academics in other disciplines; language activists, missionaries, humanitarian workers, policy makers, and educators; journalists and researchers; students; and visionaries who believe that it is possible to hear their language spoken for many centuries to come in the face of many who claim otherwise. With this diversity of readers in mind, our goal was to write a book that would serve as a general reference guide to language revitalization, providing the necessary background, highlighting the central issues, indicating common obstacles, and pointing to sources of further information.

Our own experiences with language revitalization efforts have come primarily through fieldwork in east Asia on several Tungusic languages (all of which are undergoing rapid loss in the number of native speakers), and secondarily through long-term relationships and professional collaborations with fieldworkers and activists in Africa, South America, and North America, particularly the United States. This background has sensitized us to several important facts. First, although many similarities can be found in the causes of language loss around the world, this does not mean that similar approaches to language revitalization can be taken. There are simply too many differences in the political, social, and economic situations facing, say, a community in northern China versus one in southern Africa to make blanket statements about how revitalization should be carried out.

In effect, a language revitalization program is designed to change the social context in which people make choices about language use. Therefore, recognizing the particular set of variables, at both the macro-level and micro-level, that has led a language into an endangered state is pivotal in implementing a revitalization effort that has a chance of succeeding. The first three chapters each contributed to outlining a conceptual framework for understanding such variables. In order to illustrate how these variables come into play in revitalization programs, we present in this chapter four case studies. These particular cases have been chosen for a balance of geographic distribution, historical-political situation, speaker numbers and language density, type of revitalization program and the program's relative success.

First we discuss the case of Siberian native languages and the impact of the national level language policies of the Soviet Union and now of the Russian Federation. Beyond the impact of Russian, the national level language, this study also highlights the effects of multilingualism and heavy language contact at a more local level. In our analysis of Siberia we mention many different local languages, but the focus is on the Evenki language and its revitalization movement. Next we examine the Shuar language in Ecuador, which provides a very different view of language revitalization due to a different set of local and national level factors.

Introduction

Language revitalization involves counter-balancing the forces which have caused or are causing language shift. At a general level a similar set of forces can be said to operate in most language loss situations, but every case is, in fact, distinct. There are unique historical, economic, societal, and political factors that have affected the manner in which language shift occurs. Therefore, a successful language revitalization program requires addressing a complex set of factors that leads individuals in a particular community to make the choices about language use that they do. It requires, to as great a degree as possible, an understanding of diverse issues such as how uniform attitudes about a local language are within a community, the contexts in which speakers of one language interact with speakers of other languages, the spiritual or cultural values that may be associated with a language, national and regional policies concerning language teaching, and so on.

There is an understandable temptation when confronted with the monumental task of revitalization to look for that one single program which holds the key to success for different language groups around the globe, a tested framework that can be replicated for each situation. This simply does not exist, nor can it exist, because for every individual community a specific combination of issues enters into the picture. Each situation is unique, although there is a commonality of factors shared by most communities.

Introduction

The decision to include local literacy as part of a language revitalization effort often entails the creation of a written form of the language, either because no such form has ever existed or because it has fallen into disuse, as noted in Chapter 5. In this chapter, we move to what is perhaps the chief consideration in standardizing language, the development of an orthography. Though some of the same general issues mentioned in the previous chapter are also relevant to orthography development and will need to be revisited, we have opted to devote a separate chapter to orthographies for two main reasons. First, since the creation of symbols to encode a spoken language is a precondition for any literacy in that language, many people involved in nascent language revitalization efforts find themselves confronted with the practical questions of how to go about creating an effective orthography. They have decided to make the first steps towards developing literacy in a local language, but are unsure of how to create materials for reading and writing. Second, most of the available resources on language revitalization do not contain more than cursory discussions about orthography (Hinton and Hale 2001 is a notable exception), even though they identify local literacy as a commonly desired aim of revitalization efforts.

One of the most important aspects of orthography development is the recognition that, beyond purely linguistic considerations, there are a range of social, psychological, economic, political, and historical issues involved in making decisions about how to write a language.

Introduction

One of the most complicated issues in language revitalization is literacy. It is often assumed that literacy is a necessary first step in language revitalization programs: developing literacy in a local language can imbue a greater sense of prestige to it; most school-based revitalization programs typically require literacy; literacy in a local language makes it suitable for use in many modern social domains; and so on. At the same time, it has also been argued that literacy can actually facilitate acquisition of a majority language, thereby accelerating the loss of the very language it was instated to protect. Instituting literacy can be very divisive as decisions are made about what the standard form of a language should take, decisions that inevitably promote the use of one dialect over others. Literacy bears a complex relation to other features of culture, and so it usually involves reshaping a non-literate culture to some degree, and it inevitably poses a challenge to the place of oral tradition. It assumes a literate group within a culture who can serve as teachers, and the development of this group requires outside expertise and, possibly, outside funding. These influences add another level of complexity. Such considerations point to the more central issues in language revitalization. Is literacy necessary for revitalization in today's world? What are the potential benefits and what are the potential detriments to a local culture with the introduction of literacy?