IMPACT Endangered Languages studies and Languages in Danger in language Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights and Luna F i l i p o v i ´c society Martin Pütz 42 JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society issn 1385-7908 IMPACT publishes monographs, collective volumes, and text books on topics in sociolinguistics. The scope of the series is broad, with special emphasis on areas such as language planning and language policies; language conflict and language death; language standards and language change; dialectology; diglossia; discourse studies; language and social identity (gender, ethnicity, class, ideology); and history and methods of sociolinguistics. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/impact General Editors Ana Deumert Kristine Horner University of Cape Town University of Sheffield Advisory Board Peter Auer Marlis Hellinger University of Freiburg University of Frankfurt am Main Jan Blommaert Elizabeth Lanza Ghent University University of Oslo Annick De Houwer William Labov University of Erfurt University of Pennsylvania J. Joseph Errington Peter L. Patrick Yale University University of Essex Anna Maria Escobar Jeanine Treffers-Daller University of Illinois at Urbana University of the West of England Guus Extra Victor Webb Tilburg University University of Pretoria Volume 42 Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger. Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights Edited by Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights Edited by Luna Filipović University of East Anglia Martin Pütz University of Koblenz-Landau John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. doi 10.1075/impact.42 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016030381 (print) / 2016049866 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 5834 2 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6644 6 (e-book) An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access isbn for this book is 978 90 272 6644 6. © 2016 – John Benjamins B.V. This e-book is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com Table of contents Foreword vii Introduction: Endangered languages and languages in danger 1 Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz Section 1. Perspectives on endangerment: Ideology, language policy and language rights North-South relations in linguistic science: Collaboration or colonialism? 25 Colette Grinevald and Chris Sinha Indigenous language policies in Brazil: Training indigenous people as teachers and researchers 45 Ana Suelly Arruda Câmara Cabral, Wany Bernardete de Araujo Sampaio and Vera Da Silva Sinha Language rights in danger: Access to justice and linguistic (in)equality in multilingual judicial contexts 61 Liz Hales and Luna Filipović Towards language planning for sign languages: Measuring endangerment and the treatment of British Sign Language 87 Jill Jones A cost-and-benefit approach to language loss 115 Salikoko S. Mufwene Section 2. Language documentation, ethno-history and language vitality Language documentation 20 years on 147 Peter K. Austin vi Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger The brief existence of Saipan Carolinian: A study of a vanishing language storing valuable linguistic and historical insights on the tongue of its speakers 171 S. James Ellis Aikanã and Kwaza: Their ethno-historical and sociolinguistic context in Rondônia, Brazil 203 Hein van der Voort Metaphors of an endangered forest people, the Yanomae (N. Brazil) 231 Gale Goodwin Gómez Measuring and understanding ethnolinguistic vitality in Papapana 249 Ellen Smith Section 3. Language transmission: Shift, loss and survival The art of losing: Beyond java, patois and postvernacular vitality – Repositioning the periphery in global Asian ecologies 283 Lisa Lim Reacting to language endangerment: The Akie of north-central Tanzania 313 Bernd Heine, Christa König and Karsten Legère Language transmission and use in a bilingual setting in rural Tanzania: Findings from an in-depth study of Ngoni 335 Tove Rosendal Language shift and endangerment in urban and rural East Africa: Three case studies 351 Maik Gibson and B. Araali Bagamba Redefining priorities, methods and standards in endangered-language lexicography: From lexical erosion in Palikur to areal lexicography 361 François Nemo and Antonia Cristinoi Jewish language varieties: Loss and survival 387 Bernard Spolsky Index 411 Foreword There is general consensus among linguists and language experts that slightly more than 7,000 languages (Ethnologue 2015)1 are spoken by 7 billion people around the world today and that half of them are under threat of extinction with- in fifty to one hundred years, a dramatic change in human history. Today at least 3,000 mainly indigenous or local languages are endangered, seriously endangered or dying in many parts of the world. Our planet seems to exhibit an astonishing ratio of speakers to their languages: 97% of the world’s people speak about 4% of the world’s languages (UNESCO 2003). This information informs the premise of the current volume because it fo- cusses our attention on two facets of interest here: endangered languages and languages in danger. We believe it is important to make this distinction and ad- dress both themes in a holistic approach. Endangered languages are those that are moving towards extinction, for a variety of reasons that our contributors discuss, mainly related to diminishing sizes of speaker populations, lifestyle changes and other socio-economic and political factors. Languages in danger, on the other hand, refers to the circumstances that create a disadvantaged position for speak- ers of certain languages when they find themselves within another linguistic en- vironment that speaks a different, majority language. Some of our contributions point out the issues that need to be raised in this context since, technically, many languages, or more precisely their speakers, can find themselves in danger, which can then lead to inequality and injustice. Interestingly, we show that the size of the speaker population does not matter when it comes to languages in danger. Specifically, even speakers of a very populous language can find themselves in danger because of their language within countries where their language is not spoken, thus requiring translation-mediated communication. This status creates a number of barriers for such speakers and may result in serious negative conse- quences for those speakers. The common thread of argumentation in this volume is that we need to study all the roles that languages and their respective statuses in different contexts play when it comes to social interactions in our multilin- gual world and the need for peaceful co-existence amidst linguistic and cultural 1. The most recent web edition of the Ethnologue (2015, 18th edn.) contains information on 7,102 known living languages. viii Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger diversity. We hope that the current volume sets out directions for current and future explorations in this vein. The volume examines the causes behind this dra- matic loss of linguistic diversity, why this is an issue, how processes of language shift are triggered and what can be done and achieved to document and support endangered, moribund and small languages especially in the context of an ever increasing globalized world. Some of the questions posed in the present volume are, amongst others: How can a minority/indigenous language be maintained in this era of globalization, what are the main reasons for language shift, what do we lose when languages die and what is the role of language policy and planning strategies in multilingual contexts? And finally, what are the benefits of docu- menting and archiving endangered languages for linguistics, related disciplines and our human cultural heritage in general, especially in the light of new advanc- es in technology and methods of data collection? In this vein, the context of lan- guage shift, language threat and loss in multilingual situations are explored, with all the challenges and consequences involved. These are discussed from a variety of perspectives: sociolinguistics, anthropology and the sociology of language in- cluding language contact, language ecology, language policy/planning, language rights, and language documentation. The collection of contributions included in this volume was originally pre- sented at the 36th International LAUD Symposium on Endangered Languages, which took place on March 31 – April 3, 2014 at the University of Koblenz- Landau (Landau campus). The chapters included for publication here are a small selection from those presented at the conference. A second collection of papers stemming from the same conference was edited by Martin Pütz and Neele Mundt (2016) and is entitled “Vanishing Languages in Context: Ideological,