These two books deal with the same profound statistic – that approximately half of the world's languages are currently endangered. Running through both volumes is a tension in how we think about this fact – whether it is a technical, or a political, issue. The choice of broad approach is significant for how we understand the causes and significance of language endangerment, and what actions we take in response to it.
A technical approach, most evident in Cataloguing, but also present in the Handbook, tends to see language endangerment as a global crisis akin to biodiversity loss or climate change, threatening all of humanity if not existentially, then at least metaphysically. According to this view, the drivers of language endangerment are typically vague “forces”: political domination, globalization, modernization. The consequences of language endangerment and loss focus on our collective diminishment as a species, primarily the loss of knowledge, but also the loss of diversity itself. The proposed solution to this problem is, first, more and better data, and second, targetted interventions, often technological, that are primarily aimed at capturing what is being lost, rather than preventing that loss.
A political approach, by contrast, looks at language endangerment and loss more as a human problem than a problem of humanity. Rather than an issue of general concern for all people everywhere, it sees language endangerment as a challenge facing specific populations, but repeated multiple times across a globally uneven political landscape. It examines the ways in which language endangerment comes about through specific historical events and particular political arrangements, rather than generic forces. And instead of prioritizing technical and technological interventions (though these are used), this approach centres people in addressing language endangerment: through empowerment, education, and activism. This approach is most evident in the Handbook in the many excellent contributions on revitalization, rights, collaboration, and the politics of languages. It is also used in Cataloguing in a chapter that looks at how the book can be used by communities whose languages are at risk.
These two approaches are not always in conflict, but sometimes they are, and jarringly so. We see therefore, on the one hand, efforts to resist the language of “language death” and affirm the potential for language revitalization, alongside discussions of the inevitability of loss and the impossibility of revitalization. We can imagine speakers of endangered languages reading these books (an idea I will come back to later) and being deeply confused about how to proceed. Given their usually limited resources (time, money, personnel, expertise, etc.), should they get a linguist to document their inevitably “moribund” language? Engage in activism to improve their political circumstances? Co-design an app? Should they hope for a better future for themselves, or only for the knowledge encoded in their language? And if biodiversity and linguistic diversity are correlated, then how does this translate into a programme of action for a community subjected to language oppression (see Alice Taff et al. in the Handbook for a discussion of this useful term)?
Despite these tensions, I think the most significant problem regarding the two approaches in these volumes is the missed opportunities to explore how they might be combined for mutual benefit (particularly how technical approaches might support political ones). Cataloguing, for example, provides a wealth of new and interesting information about global patterns of language endangerment, but a persistent failure to analyse this information as politically meaningful limits its significance. For example, in examining the distribution of endangered languages around the world, the obvious congruence between language endangerment and settler colonialism is not discussed. Nor is the irony that settler colonial, mostly Anglophone countries, are world leaders in language revitalization. Can we not use our knowledge of broad global patterns of diversity and loss to probe what sort of political systems create language endangerment and support language revitalization? And can we not look at the global distribution of endangered languages to problematize the geopolitics of our knowledge production (after all, the Handbook has a chapter on revitalizing Māori, followed by a chapter on “Language revitalization in Africa”)?
Given how relatively well-established the technical approach to language endangerment already is, what is most exciting in these volumes, particularly the Handbook, is the expansion of approaches that address language endangerment as a political issue. These include discussions of research ethics, working with diaspora communities, technology in the service of revitalization, training of teachers, activists, and community linguists, discussions about a global survey of language revitalization efforts, and the importance of co-design and collaboration.
Despite the promise of these contributions, both books could benefit from an expansion of the case studies discussed, beyond the more familiar stories from CANZUS (Canada, Australian, New Zealand and US), the Nordic countries, and Latin America, and into the very under-represented continents of Africa and Asia. If we actually want to understand language endangerment as a global phenomenon, more effort needs to be made to include languages, linguists, and activists from these regions.
However, one fact about these two books points to the difficulty of such inclusivity – namely, their price. Both these books are very expensive (£100/£115). People will, and should, be upset by this. However, it is important to reflect on the fact that if you can read English and get online, then you are capable of accessing most of these materials for free – through Google Books, academic repositories, emailing authors, via a library, or other means. If, however, you are one of the 70 million people who speak an endangered language, you are also less likely to speak the global lingua franca, and more likely to be on the wrong side of the digital divide. Access to powerful languages, to education, to digital platforms – globally, these are the most significant pay-walls, not price. And there is, I think, a telling parallel between the gaps in our knowledge and the people excluded by our knowledge production. Regardless of whether we think of language endangerment as a technical or political issue, our understanding of it will continue to be limited by the exclusion of people and languages from its study.
