While other disciplines have achieved a high public profile for global issues such as environmental degradation and biodiversity of plants and animals, linguistics has so far failed to do so for disappearing or endangered languages. Language endangerment is a very fundamental issue for humanity. What rights do minority communities have concerning their languages? How does each language conceptualise the world differently? How much knowledge about the world and a local ecosystem is lost when a language disappears? And for linguists, what is the process involved and how can insights about this process contribute to linguistic theory? What typological insights will be lost if undescribed languages disappear before their structural properties are known? And for applied linguists, often the same people who wish to contribute something back to the community where they do research, how can language shift be stopped or reversed?
The editors and other contributors have long been working in the field formerly called language death' and now less pessimistically known as language endangerment; both to document the precious resources of endangered minority languages around the world and to help communities who want to keep their languages. This volume, which is one outcome of a large joint research project funded by the Australian Research Council and the UNESCO Endangered Languages project, represents the insights of twenty scholars, mainly from Australia but also from Europe and North America. It represents work in a wide variety of indigenous and migrant communities in developed and developing countries of every continent but Africa. This ranges from work with groups who still have viable languages but feel these to be under threat, to efforts to revive completely dead languages. The volume comprises a general overview introduction, four theoretical chapters on what happens during language shift, ten case studies of autochthonous languages under threat, four case studies of migrant languages at risk, and three concluding chapters discussing strategies and resources for language maintenance.