TITLE:
Toward Designing and Implementing Language Revitalization Programs in Academia and Community
AUTHORS:
Hossein Ghanbari (Odivi)
KEYWORDS:
Indigenous, Language Shift, Language Loss, Language Revitalization Program, Academia, Community, Success
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.10 No.6,
December
22,
2020
ABSTRACT: People of the world speak diverse languages and develop different worldviews accordingly. However, due to diverse reasons many of these languages are dying, inducing widespread language shift and loss among their speakers. As languages embed their speakers’ unique epistemologies and ontologies, their loss triggers the loss of those epistemologies and ontologies, among other things. To avoid that, language revitalization (LR) programs have been designed and implemented in academia and communities to help revive and maintain endangered languages. Thus, it is vital to explore to what extent these LR programs provide for the linguistic and cultural needs of their stakeholders. It is advocated that language revitalizers avoid over-generalizing among communities, consult and incorporate Indigenous peoples and their communities in their LR programs, and design and implement LR programs based on the Indigeneity and features of each language and the community in which it is spoken.