Publications
Publication details [#48469]
Rood, David S., K. David Harrison and Arienne Dwyer, eds. 2008. Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages. (Typological Studies in Language 78). John Benjamins. vi+375 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English
Keywords
Annotation
This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our common human heritage that is linguistic diversity. The window of opportunity for documentation is narrower than the actual lifetime of a language, and is now rapidly closing for many languages represented in this volume. The authors of these papers unveil newly collected data from previously poorly known and endangered languages. They organize highly complex linguistic facts - paradigms, affixes, vowel patterns - while pointing out the theoretically challenging aspects of these. Beyond this, they reflect on the social and human dimensions, discussing particular problems of nostalgia and modernity, memory and forgetting, and obsolescence and ethics, while viewing language as not merely data on a page but as a living creation in the minds and mouths of its speakers.
Articles in this volume
Guirardello-Damian, Raquel, Emmanuel de Vienne and Aurore Monod Becquelin. Working Together: The interface between researchers and the native people - The Trumai case. 43–66
Heckenberger, Michael, Bruna Franchetto and Carlos Fausto. Language, ritual and historical reconstruction: Towards a linguistic, ethnographical and archaeological account of Upper Xingu Society. 129–158
Gippert, Jost. Endangered Caucasian languages in Georgia: Linguistic parameters of language endangerment. 159–194
González, Félix Rodríguez and Lucía A. Golluscio. Contact, attrition and shift in two Chaco languages: The cases of Tapiete and Vilela. 195–242