{"id":63865,"date":"2015-04-14T22:29:01","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T20:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/?page_id=63865"},"modified":"2015-09-05T12:17:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-05T10:17:18","slug":"being-a-linguist","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/en\/being-a-linguist\/","title":{"rendered":"Being a linguist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted by Colette Grinevald et James Costa on October 7, 2011<\/span>
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\nBy Colette Grinevald, linguist, DDL laboratory (Language Dynamics), University of Lyon 2, and James Costa, Research associate, French Institute for Education, Ecole Nationale Sup\u00e9rieure, Lyon, France.<\/em>
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\"Miss

Miss Nora teaching rama – \u00a9 Colette Grinevald<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Emergence of a research discipline<\/strong><\/p>\n

The phenomenon of language extinction has been known for numerous decades, but an active form of awareness rose in the 1970s in various countries such as France, UK, and USA.<\/p>\n

Not until the dawn of the 1990s, however, did the theme of endangered languages truly emerge. The period was marked with the 500th anniversary of the Discovery of America (1492-1992), celebrated by some, criticized by others. It was then that the work of several researchers encountered the demands of field activists in indigenous communities of the Americas. This encounter created a shockwave among linguists, and showed to be the actual kick-off of a new field of research.<\/p>\n

From then on, a network of linguists from America, Australia, and Europe was put in motion \u2013 linguists who shared a long experience in the field upon various contexts of language endangerment. They began to coordinate their projects, organize conferences everywhere across the planet, and produce a number of individual or collective publications.
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\"Children

Children learning Rama – \u00a9 Claudia Gordillo<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

The part played by linguists<\/strong><\/p>\n

Linguists involved in this new span of research soon considered it was in the interest of their own profession, as well as their responsibility as citizens of the world, to sound the alarm on the severe precariousness of most of the world\u2019s languages.<\/p>\n

Beyond the research activities they have been trained for, rises the question of their role in respect to the demands of populations: while their academic work consists in describing and documenting these languages \u2013 which remain relatively or completely unknown so far, and usually also un-written \u2013, what the populations ask for has more to do with the revitalization and revaluation of their endangered languages.<\/p>\n

Faced with the issue, a common attitude, dominant in an ideological context in favor of monolingualism, consists in doing nothing, and considering processes of language extinction as a natural outcome of processes that were always at work.<\/p>\n

Another attitude admits that linguistic phenomena aren\u2019t natural, quite the contrary: they are cultural, deeply ideological, and often involve unbalanced power relationships.<\/p>\n

Thus developed, in the course of the past twenty years, a discourse aiming to display arguments in favor of maintaining as much linguistic diversity as possible, as a constituent of the human specie.
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\"Young

oung women playing in Rama- \u00a9 Colette Grinevald<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Summing up the issues at stake<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2000 British linguist David Crystal published a prime example of a case statement on endangered languages. According to Crystal, linguistic diversity must be secured for the following reasons:<\/p>\n