1 Stolen Life, Preserved Language: Life and Death and Endangered Languages1 Ethnographic Contributions to the Study of Endangered Languages, Tania Granadillo & Heidi Orcutt, editors. University of Arizona Press, 2011, pp. 113-133.. Barbara G. Hoffman, Ph.D. Dept. of Anthropology Cleveland State University Email:
[email protected] 1. Background For over two decades, the dearth of case studies of language shift, language death, and language revitalization has been deplored by Africanist linguists (cf Dimmendaal 1989; Brenzinger, et al 1998) In addition to linguistic documentation of the many indigenous African languages heretofore minimally described, the study of the sociocultural contexts of language shift that are causing minority African languages to be “abandoned in favor of other, more prestigious, African languages” is urgently needed. (Brenzinger, et al 1998:19) Among the numerous West African language groups that have received minimal attention from linguists and anthropologists is the cluster of fourteen related languages commonly known as the Togo Remnant (TR) group, all but one of which are spoken within a relatively compact geographical area in SW Togo and SE Ghana.2 The need for documentation of the structural, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic dimensions of language use within these communities is particularly acute for Anyimere (Ghana) and Igo (Togo).3 These two TR languages have been officially recognized as endangered, both by the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages and by the “Survey of Language Endangerment in Africa” (results of which were published as Sommer 1992). A comparison of the cases of these two related endangered Togo-Remnant languages, Anyimere and Igo, both spoken in an area of Togo and Ghana now divided by a national border, demonstrates the power of determined and long-term individual leadership to slow the process of language death.