1314: How to Preserve a Language Jul 16, 2018

One of the greatest challenges in the field of language revitalization is knowing where to put time and resources, specifically between working with communities to make the language-use more viable or whether it should be recorded along with the grammar and any other ethnographic resources. The former is obviously preferable because it allows the community to maintain its language and give other researchers time to study, but there are a few problems with this. Namely, it is more costly both in time and money, and requires not only a good linguist but a good community-organizer. Moreover, the community must be willing to work with people who are presumably outsiders, and this is not always the case for reasons of pride, economics, or if there are simply not enough speakers, either for accessible or total population. Because of these factors, and many others, while most linguists—and people generally—would probably prefer to make the maintenance of a minority language feasible, there is also a very real concern sometimes that within a matter of years or decades, the given language will be dead, and so should be recorded as a last ditch effort; the question becomes when that call needs to be made.
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