Language Endangerment and Renewal

Out of the world’s roughly 7000 languages, 3000 are under-resourced and under-recognized, and threatened with discrimination and limited use in their communities of origin. Most threatened languages are indigenous, their speakers having responded to colonial dispossession by shifting to politically and economically dominant languages. While all languages change, the global shift away from indigenous languages represents an unprecedented loss of global linguistic heritage and diversity. Some communities have responded with programs designed to reclaim and renew heritage languages for future generations. We will apply linguistic, anthropological, decolonizing, and data science methods to the project of indigenous language reclamation. 3 hrs. lect.