Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9684733 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wesley Y Leonard (0000-0001-8792-4414, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 152 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 69-83 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Daedalus (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-5266 • E-ISSN: 1548-6192 |
| Publisher | MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/daed_a_02018 |
| OpenAlex | W4386265305 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 19 |
| References cited | 7 |
Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society's consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation
Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Harm · Indigenous · Linguistics · Narrative · Political science · Praxis · Sociology · Ecology · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Second Language Learning and Teaching
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| Unique citing works | 19 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 6,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 18 |