Language Shift Among The Navajos

Discusses the alarming reduction in the speaking of the Navajo language on the reservation, mapping out some of the intricacies of relations between the English and Navajo languages and the teaching of them, explaining why and how Navajos are having difficulty maintaining their native language, and making suggestions as to what can be done about this.

Discusses the alarming reduction in the speaking of the Navajo language on the reservation, mapping out some of the intricacies of relations between the English and Navajo languages and the teaching of them, explaining why and how Navajos are having difficulty maintaining their native language, and making suggestions as to what can be done about this.

Defenders of threatened languages all over the world, from advocates of biodiversity to dedicated defenders of their own cultural authenticity, are often humbled by the dimensity of the task that they are faced with when the weak and the few seek to find a safe-harbour against the ravages of the strong and the many. This book provides both practical case studies and theoretical directions from all five continents and advances thereby the collective pursuit of "reversing language shift" for the greater benefit of cultural democracy everywhere.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Engaging Native American Publics considers the increasing influence of Indigenous groups as key audiences, collaborators, and authors with regards to their own linguistic documentation and representation. The chapters critically examine a variety of North American case studies to reflect on the forms and effects of new collaborations between language researchers and Indigenous communities, as well as the types and uses of products that emerge with notions of cultural maintenance and linguistic revitalization in mind. In assessing the nature and degree of change from an early period of "salvage" research to a period of greater Indigenous "self-determination," the volume addresses whether increased empowerment and accountability has truly transformed the terms of engagement and what the implications for the future might be.

This book is about the theory and practice of assistance to speech-communities whose native languages are threatened because their intergenerational continuity is proceeding negatively, with fewer and fewer speakers (or readers, writers and even understanders) every generation.

Native American Rhetoric is the first book to explore rhetorical traditions from within individual Native communities and Native languages. The essays set a new standard for how rhetoric is talked about, written about, and taught. The contributors argue that Native rhetorical practices have their own interior logic, which is grounded in the morality and religion of their given traditions. Once we understand the ways in which Native rhetorical practices are rooted in culture and tradition, the phenomenological expression of the speech patterns becomes clear. The value of Native communities and their languages is underlined throughout the essays. Lawrence W. Gross and the contributors successfully represent several, but not all, Native communities across the United States and Mexico, including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Choctaw, Nahua, Chickasaw and Chicana, Tohono O'odham, Navajo, Apache, Hupa, Lower Coast Salish, Koyukon, Tlingit, and Nez Perce. Native American Rhetoric will be an essential resource for continued discussions of Native American rhetorical practices in and beyond the discipline of rhetoric.