Introduction to the Study of Language

1.0 INTRODUCTION. Languages are dynamic systems. They change with time, innovating and adapting as speakers put them to new use. But the continuity of language depends crucially on the transmission of language from one generation to the next. In many ...
2.0 THE STATUS OF THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES. Language loss is not a new phenomenon. Languages have been created and forgotten thousands of times in the history of human societies. In fact, there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck in East Africa approxima...
3.0 MECHANISMS OF LANGUAGE SHIFT No language is inherently more or less useful than another. There are many causes of language shift, but none of them have to do with structural properties of the language itself. Morris Swadesh, a linguist who worked ...
4.0 QUANTIFYING LANGUAGE LOSS. How do we know that a language is endangered? UNESCO (2003) considers a language to be endangered when it is “on a path toward extinction.” Intuitively, we might correlate level of endangerment with the number of speaker...
5.0 DIGITAL LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT. There is another perspective from which nearly all languages can be considered to be endangered. Over the past few decades language use has become increasingly mediated by digital devices such as computers and mobile...
Only 13 Wikipedias have more than one million articles, and some of these, such as the Swedish and Cebuano Wikipedias, consist of mostly computer-generated content with very little depth. This means that most internet users interact with Wikipedia usi...
6.0 WHY SHOULD WE CARE? As discussed above, language loss is not a new phenomenon; rather, language loss is a natural part of the evolution of human languages. So if that is the case, why should we be concerned about the recent increase in the rate of...
	6.1 The scientific value of endangered languages. The preservation of endangered languages has a very clear value to science. As a uniquely human phenomenon, language tells us something about what it means to be human, about the nature of humanity. T...
	6.2 Linguistic diversity and sustainability. Linguists often borrow metaphors from biology. They speak of languages as evolving, descending from a common ancestors, and becoming extinct—as if languages could be equated to individual species. While th...
	6.3 Language loss and knowledge systems. Linguistic practices are embedded in cultural realities, expressing knowledge of the physical, social, and spiritual worlds in which they are spoken. This knowledge may be bound together systematically in ling...
	6.4 Language as a human right. It is often said that people should be free to choose which language to speak. The right to express oneself using the language of one’s choosing is a basic human right, partially codified in the 1948 Universal Declarati...
7.0 RESPONSES TO LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT. While the causes of language endangerment may lie outside the field of linguistics, linguists are very much engaged in responding to the problem. Two broad categories of responses can be distinguished. Language ...
	7.1 Language Documentation. The goal of language documentation is “the creation, annotation, preservation, and dissemination of transparent records of a language” (Woodbury 2011:159). But what does it mean to create a transparent record of a language...
	7.2 Language Conservation. We often speak of language shift and language endangerment as an irreversible process. Metaphors such as “language death” suggest a finality, implying that once the last speaker of a language passes away, the language is ef...
8.0  LIVED EXPERIENCES OF LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT. With its focus on counting speakers and numbers of languages, the discourse of language endangerment can easily become one of commodification (Dobrin et al. 2007). It is all too easy to turn languages i...
9.0 CONCLUSION. Language endangerment is both a macro- and a micro-level phenomenon. On a global scale language endangerment threatens the world’s collective linguistic diversity. But on a local scale language endangerment is an intensely personal and...
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