Small-Language Fates and Prospects: Lessons of Persistence and Change from Endangered Languages: Collected Essays (Brill's Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture, 6)

In Small-language Fates and Prospects Nancy C. Dorian gathers findings from decades of documenting an endangered Scottish Gaelic dialect, presenting detailed evidence of contraction and loss but also recording a positive role for imperfect speakers. Retention of language skills undervalued by linguists but positively viewed by the community has supported the survival of local Gaelic-English bilingualism well beyond early predictions. Nonetheless, potent factors that threaten small-language survival everywhere have also operated here. Negative social attitudes towards the minority population, loss of a traditional occupation, the increasing impact of majority-culture ideologies, are recurrent phenomena in small-language settings. Maintenance or revitalization efforts pose special challenges under these circumstances, as does fieldwork itself when adverse sociohistorical forces have left very few fluent speakers.

Nancy C. Dorian, Ph.D. (1965) University of Michigan, was Professor of Linguistics at Bryn Mawr College. Her books include Language Death (1981), Investigating Obsolence (1989) and Investigating Variation (2010). She edited the Small Languages and Small Language Communities section of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language for more than two decades.