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11 - Indigenous Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 December 2025

Ilan Stavans
Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
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Summary

The wide-ranging conversation in this chapter between Ilan Stavans and Mark Turin terminological and definitional questions – such as what and who is Indigenous – the status and importance of linguistic diversity in North America and South Asia, and the role of missionaries in early dictionary work. Turin and Stavans discuss complex questions of colonialism, migration and settlement, Indigenous sovereignty in language work, and the powerful space that dictionaries occupy in language reclamation and revitalization projects. Turin offers ethnographic examples and cultural vignettes from his three decades of collaborative work with the Thangmi-speaking community of eastern Nepal, whose Indigenous Tibeto-Burman language he documented and for which he helped develop an orthography.

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  • Indigenous Languages
  • Edited by Ilan Stavans, Amherst College, Massachusetts
  • Book: Conversations on Dictionaries
  • Online publication: 25 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009392433.012
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  • Indigenous Languages
  • Edited by Ilan Stavans, Amherst College, Massachusetts
  • Book: Conversations on Dictionaries
  • Online publication: 25 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009392433.012
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Indigenous Languages
  • Edited by Ilan Stavans, Amherst College, Massachusetts
  • Book: Conversations on Dictionaries
  • Online publication: 25 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009392433.012
Available formats
×