What is it about?
Perhaps as much as 90% of the languages in the world are or will be threatened during the 21st century, and many of them will disappear. But what are the keys to language survival? This volume studies the case of several languages that are not spoken by many millions of speakers but nevertheless seem serving developed societies and do not seem to be in danger in order to learn from them some lessons that may lead to a more sustainable model of global linguistic diversity.
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Why is it important?
This book may help language planers, managers, teachers and activists all around the world who want their languages to survive in the next century to identify some of the conditions they should meet if they want them. The case studies provide lots of inspiring ideas, and the final synthesis helps evaluating the goals that may be posed from a realistic stance.
Perspectives
We wanted this book to be basically useful, and we did learn a lot from editing it. For us it was basic to avoid political correctness and taboos. We therefore tried to face facts, whether they were political, ideological, economic or other, keeping alwys in mind that the sole way to warrant linguistic sustainibility is to combine a global and a local stance. We hope it becomes inspiring for as many language communities as possible.
Dr F. Xavier Vila
Universitat de Barcelona
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 1. The Analysis of Medium-Sized Language Communities, December 2012, Channel View Publications, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.21832/9781847698360-003.
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