Course Information

Language Endangerment and Language Death

Class Description

GEC 8: Issues in the Contemporary World
Revised GEC 5: Issues in the Contemporary World

 

Of the 6,000 or so languages in the world today, more than half are seriously in danger of losing all their speakers and dying out altogether. The chief goal of this course is to study the phenomenon of language endangerment — and by the same token, dialect endangerment — from several perspectives, considering such questions as:

• what are the social, economic, and political factors causing language/dialect endangerment?
• how does minority status for a language/dialect affect its speakers?
• what effects can endangerment have on the structure of a language/dialect?
• are there meaningful parallels to be drawn between language/dialect endangerment and the endangerment of biological species? Between linguistic diversity and bio-diversity?
• is language/dialect endangerment a new phenomenon or has it been going on for millennia?
• can language/dialect endangerment and death be reversed? Are revitalization efforts possible? Are they successful?
• what can be done to document languages/dialects that are threatened with extinction?

A secondary course goal is to introduce the principles and methods of linguistics relevant to studying language endangerment (e.g., the embedding of language in society, the interaction between language and culture, the relation of speakers to their language, how languages are structured, how languages change, etc.)

A tertiary course goal is to develop students' critical thinking and argumentation skills. The class will apply these as it develops a wiki page on language endangerment.