This website offers free language learning courses for indigenous communities to use in teaching their traditional languages to younger generations.
Mike Vuolo, Episode #16 of Lexicon Valley (”Our Dying Words”), aired on July 9, 2012
Language Revitalization: Children Are Key Players
Linguist K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College (USA) says,
”The decision to give up one language or to abandon a language is not usually a free decision. It’s often coerced by politics, by market forces, by the educational system in a country, by a larger, more dominant group telling them that their language is backwards and obsolete and worthless.“
The key players in language revitalization are the 5- and 6-year-olds in the communities, Harrison says.
"They’re like little barometers of social prestige, and they understand that if two languages are spoken in their environment, and one of them is more highly valued, they will gravitate toward that more highly valued language,” he says. “So the key to saving a language is to create prestige of the language in the eyes of the very youngest speakers. The way you do that is to put it in a high-tech medium — we create, for example, talking dictionaries. People can do creative things like producing hip-hop or poetry in the language.”
source: NPR article “In The Search For ‘Last Speakers,’ A Great Discovery“
Colin G. Calloway
Luther Standing Bear, aka Plenty Kill
Claude Hagège, On the Death and Life of Languages (Yale University Press, 2009), trans. by Jody Gladding
W. S. Merwin
Arlene W. Eaton, Hawai’ian kupuna (’elder’)
Donna Patrick, “Indigenous language endangerment and the unfinished business of nation states”
Donna Patrick, “Indigenous language endangerment and the unfinished business of nation states”
Shaylih Muehlmann, “Defending diversity: Staking out a common global interest?”
Shaylih Muehlmann, “Defending diversity: Staking out a common global interest?”
Shaylih Muehlmann, “Defending diversity: Staking out a common global interest?”
Revitalizing Indigenous Languages: How to Recreate a Lost Generation (Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights) by Marja-Liisa Othuis, Suvi Kivelä & Tove Skutnabb-Kangas