Following in the wake of a number of recent books about language endangerment or language death, this work, with its discourse-analytic perspective, turns a critical eye on the received wisdom in linguistics concerning the endangerment of human linguistic diversity. Some of the authors state that their intention, however, is not to question the reality of the threats to language diversity but merely to analyze the ways language endangerment ideologies are discursively constructed. The 13 chapters, each with its own endnotes and bibliography, stand alone well and can be read in any order, but the book coheres nicely around its central perspective, first developed by Heller and Duchêne's opening chapter.
Two chapters, those by Patrick and Crowley, focus on the use of a discourse of language endangerment as part of a larger political strategy: in Patrick's case by Aboriginal peoples of Canada seeking redress for past wrongs of land appropriation, assimilation, broken treaties, and genocide and in Crowley's case by proponents of Gaelic and Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland establishing political alignments. Similarly, Jaffe examines attempts at Corsican language revitalization, seeking to show that language advocacy is never neutral and often has unintended consequences. She argues for the polynomic model of norms, in which the monolithic norm associated with standard languages is rejected, and that linguistic uses (e.g., to express social identities) should be dissociated from specific linguistic forms in language advocacy.
Examining interview data from Evolène, the commune in Valais Canton, Switzerland, considered to be the last place where Francoprovençal is still transmitted in the home, Maître and Matthey argue that linguistic interviews cannot be considered objective windows on an existing sociolinguistic reality but are at least partially the means by which this reality is constructed, with language attitudes expressed during the interviews having been partly induced by the attitudes of the researchers themselves.
Several chapters have a particular focus on the media's role in endangered language settings. Boudreau and Dubois reveal that the Acadian community of Baie Sainte Marie, Nova Scotia is torn between competing ideologies on matters surrounding public use of the vernacular (in particular, on a local radio station), with the two main camps being (a) proponents of the standard seeking connections with the rest of la Francophonie and (b) proponents of the dialect striving to preserve what is locally regarded as the oldest North American variety of French. Pujolar examines a 2003 corpus of newspaper articles that constitute a debate on the future of Catalan. The author analyzes the journalistic construction of insiders and outsiders with implications about who has a right to define what it means to be Catalan.
Four chapters are concerned with languages whose inclusion in the collection may at first seem surprising in that they are not endangered by any of the usual metrics (Swedish, English, French, Spanish). However, all four authors (Milani, Schmidt, Moïse, and del Valle) identify perceived threats to these languages either by outside world languages (such as English, in the case of Swedish) or by minority or immigrant populations (Hispanics in the United States, speakers of regional languages in France), or even by the possibility that the language could fragment into separate national norms (Spanish). What these authors find is that, in each of these cases, the discourse around these perceived threats closely resembles the endangered language discourse constructed around minority tongues.
Biological metaphors have long permeated linguistics. Muehlmann explores how the ecological concept of biodiversity has been appropriated by the endangered language movement, notably in the promotional materials of certain conservation programs, in order to situate the perceived linguistic crisis in a framework similar to the biological one, although sometimes with contradictory results. In the book's final chapter, Cameron examines how the issue of endangered languages has been able to move into the mainstream news media by being cast in terms of dramatic events and crises presented in emotive and moralistic terms. The primary trope that has been pressed into service is the analogy between endangered languages and endangered species, which emerges from a 19th-century organicist view of language.
Readers concerned about current predictions of the loss of much human linguistic diversity are unlikely to have their minds changed by this work, but it does a fine job of reasking important questions and of shedding light on how these linguistic issues have been presented to the public.
