The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages
Edited by Kenneth L. Rehg and Lyle Campbell
Abstract
The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in thirty-nine chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. Its purposes are (1) to provide a reasonably comprehensive reference volume, with the scope of the volume as a whole representing the breadth of the field; (2) to highlight both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it; and (3) to broaden understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, and, in so doing, to encourage and contribute to fresh thinking and new findings in support of endangered languages. The handbook is organized into five parts. Part I, Endangered Languages, addresses some of the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part II, Language Documentation provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part III, Language Revitalization encompasses a diverse range of topics, including approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping (“dormant”) languages. Part IV, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment. Part V, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.
Keywords:
endangered language,
language documentation,
language revitalization,
language conservation,
linguistic diversity,
language loss,
language extinction
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Sep 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190610029
- Published online:
- Aug 2018
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190610029.001.0001
Editors
Kenneth L. Rehg,
editor
Kenneth L. Rehg is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (retired) and an authority on the languages of Micronesia, a region in which he has conducted fieldwork over the course of the past five decades. He is the (co)author of three books and numerous papers on these languages, founding editor of Language Documentation & Conservation, and the 2009 Chair of the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation. His interests include language documentation, lexicography, phonology, historical linguistics, and the application of linguistics to the formation of educational policies and practices in the developing nations of the Pacific.
Lyle Campbell,
editor
Lyle Campbell (PhD, UCLA) is professor emeritus at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. His specializations include language documentation, historical linguistics, indigenous languages of the Americas, and typology. He was director of the Catalogue of Endangered Languages project at the University of Hawai‘i 2009–2016. He is a linguist but has also held appointments in Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Linguistics, and Spanish. His publications include 23 books and approximately 200 articles; he won the Linguistic Society of America’s “Bloomfield Book Award” twice, for American Indian Languages (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (with Alice Harris, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
