Research Articles

Endangered Languages: what should we do now?

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Abstract

We seem to be at a turning point in the history of our encounter with endangered languages, and this workshop is timely. Future historians of linguistics will surely see the 1990s as a revolutionary decade, in the way it brought the language crisis into the forefront of academic and political attention. It is remarkable what we have in fact managed to do since 1990 — hardly a decade ago — which was when the crisis began to be systematically addressed through a number of visionary articles and public statements, notably those arising out of the Endangered Languages Symposium organized by the Linguistic Society of America in 1991 (see Kraus 1992, Hale 1992), and the statement emanating from the International Congress of Linguists in Quebec in 1992 (see also Robins and Uhlenbeck 1991). UNESCO came on board in 1993, with its Endangered Languages Project. By 1995, the organizations began to appear — such as the Tokyo Clearing House, the UK Foundation for Endangered Languages, and the US Endangered Language Fund. In the mid-1990s the articles began to build up, both polemical (in the best sense) and descriptive, and collections of papers began to appear (eg. Grenoble and Whaley 1998, Matsumura 1998, Ostler 1998).

Keywords: endangered languages, language documentation, discourse, strategy

How to Cite:

Crystal, D., (2003) “Endangered Languages: what should we do now?”, Language Documentation and Description 1, 18-34. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd304