Language Planning and Policy in Native America

History, Theory, Praxis

By (author) Teresa L. McCarty

Publication date:

19 February 2013

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781847698636

Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on long-term collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language policies against the fluorescence of contemporary community-driven efforts to revitalize threatened mother tongues. Here, readers will meet those who are on the frontlines of Native American language revitalization every day. As their efforts show, even languages whose last native speaker is gone can be reclaimed through family-, community-, and school-based language planning. Offering a critical-theory view of language policy, and emphasizing Indigenous sovereignties and the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book shows how language regenesis is undertaken in social practice, the role of youth in language reclamation, the challenges posed by dominant language policies, and the prospects for Indigenous language and culture continuance current revitalization efforts hold.

In terms of both the breadth and depth of scholarship Teresa L. McCarty's Language Planning and Policy in Native America is an extraordinary contribution. The work of those in Native language revitalization, the perspectives of a number of academic disciplines as well as education and Native language policy development are uniquely and artfully brought together in this volume by a scholar whose career has had significant involvement and contribution in each area.