Book status update: Chapter 2 is done; Chapter 3, begun! Keep those likes rolling in so we can make our goal of 250 by months end! Heres the latest book excerpt: ONLY MOSTLY DEAD In the 1987 comedic film The Princess Bride, the ragtag band of friends united in their hatred for the movie’s antagonist, Prince Humperdinck, rush their champion, stable-boy turned dread pirate Westley, to a miracle worker named Miracle Max after Westley has been “killed” under torture at the hand of Humperdinck. When Miracle Max suggests that he will simply ask the apparently dead Westley why it is so important that he live, Westley’s friends object, saying: “He’s dead: he can’t talk.” Miracle Max responds: “Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. Theres a big difference between mostly dead and all dead…. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” Some have argued that numerous salient parallels can be found between biological species and languages (Harmon 1996). And indeed many of our metaphors for languages as found in phrases like “language death”, “language suicide”, “living languages”, and “killer languages”, are decidedly anthropomorphic. Nonetheless, it bears admitting that languages are not in fact biological entities. They do not have life cycles apart from the people who speak them. The same may be said for human societies (Ladefoged 1992:810). As a result, languages can be subject to processes that living creatures (excepting characters in funny movies) cannot, like being “only mostly dead.” In the 16th edition of the Ethnologue, a new category for language vitality was introduced: “dormant” (Lewis and Simons 2010:109; Simons and Lewis 2011:2). From the Latin verb meaning ‘to sleep’, dormant was chosen as a label for a language “with no remaining societal functions assigned to it” but which has “an extant community that associates their ethnic identity with it (Lewis 2009:10). The notion that such languages can be thought of as “sleeping” had previously been introduced in the literature on linguistic revitalization (Leonard 2008). However, Ethnologue 16 was the first major publication to introduce dormant as a specific vitality category. In that publication, it was also acknowledged that, for languages classified as dormant, “there are, in many cases, emerging speakers who are re-learning the language of their forebears” (Lewis 2009:10). On Wednesday, 30 October, 2013, the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), the public portal of the Endangered Languages Catalog or ElCat mentioned at the outset of this chapter, announced that it was introducing a new vitality label of its own to recognize and formalize the category of languages for which successful revitalization efforts are underway: “awakening” (ELP 2013). In order to qualify for the new label, a language must meet two criteria: first, there must not be any completely fluent native speakers of the language; and second, there must exist within the community a targeted revitalization program undertaken and overseen by an organized group of interested parties whose goal is to create fluent speakers of the language in the future (ELP 2013). Siraya [ISO 639-3 fos], a previously dormant indigenous Formosan language of Taiwan, has not had a fluent speaker since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Linguists working in conjunction with the Tainan Ping-pu Siraya Cultural Organization are now actively revitalizing the language, however. As a result, ELCat and ELP now list Siraya as an “awakening” language. It is still classified as dormant in the 17th edition of the Ethnologue.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 20:27:09 +0000
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