In certain ways, much of my life has been trying to find a ‘residual zone’ and then be allowed to not only survive but allowed to work and thrive. …The fight for endangered languages is far from over. In fact, we are in the middle of a historic shift. “We are now seeing a pattern of linguistic diversity that was originally shaped by the environment give way to a pattern that is being shaped by policy and economic realities,” Daniel Kaufman of the Endangered Language Alliance recently told the BBC. Islands, mountains and particularly productive areas with generous fisheries and bountiful forests were once residual zones, to use a term coined by linguist Johanna Nichols, regions where a huge diversity of smaller cultures could survive and even thrive. But today residual zones are disappearing; the reach of global capital and the contemporary nation-state mean that the world is increasingly down to a handful of spread zones, where almost nothing can stop a dominant language.”
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 18:39:54 +0000
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