Africa's Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches
Jason Kandybowicz and Harold Torrence
Abstract
Relatively little is known about Africa’s endangered languages. In an era when we are racing against time to study and preserve the world’s threatened languages before they go extinct, a disproportionately low amount of research and funding is devoted to the study of endangered African languages when compared to any other linguistically threatened region in the world. More regrettably, even less has been done to create a community of Africanists and concerned linguists who might work on rectifying this situation. This book puts some of Africa’s many endangered languages in the spotlight in the ... More
Relatively little is known about Africa’s endangered languages. In an era when we are racing against time to study and preserve the world’s threatened languages before they go extinct, a disproportionately low amount of research and funding is devoted to the study of endangered African languages when compared to any other linguistically threatened region in the world. More regrettably, even less has been done to create a community of Africanists and concerned linguists who might work on rectifying this situation. This book puts some of Africa’s many endangered languages in the spotlight in the hope of reversing this trend. Both documentary and theoretical perspectives are taken with a view toward highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the two approaches and exploring its consequences for research on and preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly. The articles that comprise this volume collectively advocate nurturing synergistic partnerships between documentary and theoretical linguists researching endangered African languages in order to stimulate and enhance the depth, visibility, and impact of endangered African language research in the service of altering the landscape of scholarship and activism in this field.
Keywords:
Africa,
African languages,
endangered languages,
threatened languages,
language documentation,
linguistic description,
theoretical linguistics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190256340 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190256340.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jason Kandybowicz, editor
Associate Professor of Linguistics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Harold Torrence, editor
Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles
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