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, until the shift is almost complete. But scholars have been documenting languages for hundreds of years (for some languages, thousands of years), so that some languages that have no speakers left still have enough documentation that it is possible for a motivated person to learn them. I pointed out
unusual, if opportunity of access to the dominant language is present and incentives, especially socioeconomic, motivate a shift to the dominant language. If not, as with India’s former caste system and ascribed status, the result is language maintenance. But given access and incentive, the norm for
), and much of this work happens in the classroom. Motivating students to see themselves as daily Gaelic activists and to use Gaelic together on campus ultimately prepares them for the challenge of building a life for themselves in Gaelic after they graduate. A college that not only teaches
for a Western European country (refus- ing birth certificates and identity cards to children with Breton given names, for example, as recently as the 1970 [New York Times 1975]). Yet cultural and linguistic diversity was an unproblematic fact of life in France until the 1790s, when in the aftermath
gave their ethnicity as ‘Livonian’ in the last Latvian census (Census 2011), only approximately twenty individuals can communicate in the language. Over the centuries, Livonians—who once inhabited almost a quarter of the area of today’s Latvia—have merged with other ancient tribes living in
). Recordings of dialects, often made by some of the last living speakers, document the languages of these peoples. Among the recorded themes are life histories, tales, dances and songs, rituals and world views, arts and crafts, and ecological knowledge relating to sustainable resource use. In what follows, we
life of a people. Furthermore, while the English term "culture" often denotes something that can be separated from life and demonstrated, mauli is seen as something that is a!- ways a part of a person and his or her way of living and also of a group of people and its way of living. In this sense
distinguish them from the non-Indian pop- ulation living in the same region-but those distinctive char- acteristics of English are all that they have left of any lin- guistic heritage they can call their own. (For more informa- tion, see Hutcheson and Wolfram 2000.) A more "liberal" approach to the Native
Within an active society with a thriving language, writing may develop many practical uses, not only for the develop- ment of literature, newspapers, language materials, and so on, but also for the uses of day-to-day life-letters, shopping lists, diaries, advertisements, accounting, recipes, and so on
later life, had all been raised in households where Gaelic was the first language and in a social setting where segregation of ESG speakers (residentially, occupa- tionally, in social intercourse, and in marriage) was still largely the norm. They had learned Gaelic first, as children, spoke it either