Rejecting the Marginalized Status of Minority Languages: Educational Projects Pushing Back Against Language Endangerment

This book explores Indigenous, tribal and minority (ITM) language education in oral and/or written communication and in the use of new technologies and online resources for pedagogical purposes in diverse geopolitical contexts. It demonstrates that ITM language education transpires in both formal and informal spaces for children or adults and that sometimes these spaces are online, where they become de-territorialized discourses of teaching and learning.’ The volume brings together examples of ITM language education that are challenging the forces that flatten ‘languacultures’ into artefacts of history. It also examines the economic and material realities of the people who live in and through their ‘languacultures’, or who aspire to do as much. The book will be useful for educators and all those interested in Indigenous and minority language issues, as well as for a wide range of undergraduate, graduate and research contexts where topics of language education and minority rights are the focus.

Ari Sherris is a Professor of Bilingual Education at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research interests explore communication, meaning making and complex social semiotics in multilingual contexts. Ari also documents and supports indigenous languages and teacher activists reclaiming and revitalizing their languages as they bring those languages into schooling for the Safaliba in Ghana and Salish speakers on the Flathead Reservation in the USA. He has edited four books on indigenous languages, literacies, pedagogies of revitalization and ethnography. His research appears in Writing & Pedagogy, Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, The Canadian Modern Language Review, Language Awareness, and edited volumes. 

Susan D. Penfield is Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Linguistics, University of Montana and University of Arizona, USA. Her research interests include Indigenous language policy and planning, revitalization, documentation and interdisciplinary research.