As per “Leanne Hinton: ‘Bringing the Language Home: Language Revitalization in the Family’” on the Burnaby Aboriginal Literacy Blog, Leanne Hinton will be speaking at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada at 7 p.m., on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.
Among her many accomplishments, Leanne Hinton is the co-author of the “The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice
See also the poster for the talk.
Last November, a book was published that brings together works from nearly 50 authors. Titled “Re-awakening Languages: Theory and Practice in the Revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous Languages” and available from Sydney University Press for AUD 65, the book spans about 450 pages and has an index 24 pages long. It is intended to provide people working in the field with practical examples of how language revitalization is being implemented in Australia.
The editors of “Re-awakening Languages” state in their introduction that their volume is an homage to the Green Book of Revitalization (USD 52), which came out in 2001 with more than 30 monographs on language revitalization projects. Like the “Green Book,” this publication has a mix of practice and theory, and one of the hopes expressed is that “Re-awakening Languages” will heighten awareness among revitalizers who work in a community isolated from other revitalizers. A stated aim of the authors is to ensure the content is accessible, avoiding linguistic jargon.
In the introduction, the editors also note the sense of optimism that emerges from the papers in the book.
Editors: John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh
ISBN: 9781920899554
This post was inspired by “Bringing Australian native languages back from the brink!“
As reported in the Green Book1, the Cochiti people do not feel their language should be written down. Stories and songs can be cultural property owned so that only the proper owner may tell or sing them as in the Pacific Northwest. Related to this is the question of whether non-native speakers should produce written materials of an endangered language and more generally, who is it that should be producing them as it is the person producing that will have control over the content rather than the collective culture.
This question is introduced, though not explored, in a recent New York Times article by Noam Cohen titled “Building Wikipedia in African languages”, available at the Interntional Herald Tribune.
My thanks to 용빈 말리 for the tip.
1 “Introduction to the Pueblo Languages” by Leanne Hinton, p. 62, in The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, 2001, Academic Press. ed. Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale.
