Small-Language Fates and Prospects: Lessons of Persistence and Change from Endangered Languages: Collected Essays: 6 (Brill's Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture) - Hardcover

Dorian, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004230513 ISBN 13: 9789004230514

Publisher: Brill, 2014

Synopsis

In Small-language Fates and Prospects Nancy C. Dorian gathers findings from decades of documenting an endangered Scottish Gaelic dialect, presenting detailed evidence of contraction and loss but also recording a positive role for imperfect speakers. Retention of language skills undervalued by linguists but positively viewed by the community has supported the survival of local Gaelic-English bilingualism well beyond early predictions. Nonetheless, potent factors that threaten small-language survival everywhere have also operated here. Negative social attitudes towards the minority population, loss of a traditional occupation, the increasing impact of majority-culture ideologies, are recurrent phenomena in small-language settings. Maintenance or revitalization efforts pose special challenges under these circumstances, as does fieldwork itself when adverse sociohistorical forces have left very few fluent speakers.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy C. Dorian, Ph.D. (1965) University of Michigan, was Professor of Linguistics at Bryn Mawr College. Her books include Language Death (1981), Investigating Obsolence (1989) and Investigating Variation (2010). She edited the Small Languages and Small Language Communities section of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language for more than two decades.

Edition details

• Publisher: Brill
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004230513
• ISBN 13: 9789004230514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 490