State versus community approaches to language revival

Author(s):  
Paul Monaghan ◽  
Peter Mühlhäusler
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Ghil'ad Zuckermann

This seminal book introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration. The book is divided into two main parts that represent Zuckermann’s fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival, from the ‘Promised Land’ (Israel) to the ‘Lucky Country’ (Australia) and beyond: PART 1: LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION The aim of this part is to suggest that due to the ubiquitous multiple causation, the reclamation of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, one should expect revival efforts to result in a language with a hybridic genetic and typological character. The book highlights salient morphological, phonological, phonetic, syntactic, semantic and lexical features, illustrating the difficulty in determining a single source for the grammar of ‘Israeli’, the language resulting from the Hebrew revival. The European impact in these features is apparent inter alia in structure, semantics or productivity. PART 2: LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND WELLBEING The book then applies practical lessons (rather than clichés) from the critical analysis of the Hebrew reclamation to other revival movements globally, and goes on to describe the why and how of language revival. The how includes practical, nitty-gritty methods for reclaiming ‘sleeping beauties’ such as the Barngarla Aboriginal language of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, e.g. using what Zuckermann calls talknology (talk+technology). The why includes ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian reasons such as improving wellbeing and mental health.


Author(s):  
Declan Kiberd

This chapter offers a broad-ranging discussion of the ways in which Classics could be viewed as both imperialist and anti-imperialist: so T. S. Eliot saw Britain as heir to the Roman Empire, while James Joyce’s Ulysses uses the classics disruptively. At various times the putative coordination of the Latin language with an imperial mentality was deconstructed. The use of Latin in Ireland after the Penal Laws against Catholics could be read as a challenge to the imperial Latin of the British. Later the disparaging attitude towards the Irish language by classicist J. P. Mahaffy and philologist Robert Atkinson collided with the Irish language revival, the supporters of which (e.g. Daniel Corkery) objected to classical languages, yet were paradoxically comparable to Eliot in fetishizing tradition. An alternative view is pointed out by Howard Brenton in The Romans in Britain (1981), which shows the British and the Irish to have common Celtic roots.


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