Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization ed. by Mari C. Jones and Sarah Ogilvie, and: Endangered Languages and New Technologies ed. by Mari C. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization ed. by Mari C. Jones and Sarah Ogilvie, and: Endangered Languages and New Technologies ed. by Mari C. Jones Claire Bowern Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization. Edited by Mari C. Jones and Sarah Ogilvie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 269. $95.00 (hardcover). Endangered Languages and New Technologies. Edited by Mari C. Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 211. $99.00 (hardcover). Two recent volumes from Cambridge University Press discuss aspects of language endangerment and the documentary record. The eleven contributions to Endangered Languages and New Technologies describe ways in which digital technology (particularly the World Wide Web) can help language documentation and preservation efforts. The sixteen papers in Jones and Ogilvie’s collection, on the other hand, present case studies on documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization of endangered language. Both books have excellent global coverage, with chapters describing languages in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Both include chapters on both signed and spoken languages; the Jones and Ogilvie volume, Keeping Languages Alive, also includes a chapter on a whistled (auxiliary) language. Both books have chapters oriented to endangered language communities, rather than researchers—or directed to both audiences—and taken together, they offer an inspiring snapshot of the many, varied ways in which people across the world are addressing issues of language endangerment. For the contributors to Endangered Languages and New Technologies, “new technologies” mostly involve the Internet and web delivery of content, whether for researchers (as in the chapters by Sjef Barbiers and Dorothee Beermann) or communities and language learners (as in Russell Hugo’s chapter). An exception is the chapter by [End Page 211] Hugh Patterson III on designing keyboard layouts. Others focus on database creation, including linking of underlying data and the creation of data sets that facilitate research on endangered languages. The case studies presented here form a fine cross section of both languages and topics, and I came away from the volume with a renewed appreciation of the richness of the options for endangered language tool kits. Thus, this book will be of interest both for researchers and for community members looking to brainstorm solutions to particular problems. For example, Hugo Patterson III provides a very nice overview of the issues that need to be considered in designing keyboards for typing endangered languages, a crucial extension of the discussion of “orthographies” that linguists may already be familiar with (see also the contributions to Cahill and Rice 2014). In my experience, one of the major factors in orthography development has been ease of typing (for example, the fact that digraphs are preferred over complex glyphs or accents in many “practical” Australian orthographies). The variety of contributions leaves the reader with a good impression of the range of the problems confronting language engineering, particularly for languages with neither large resources nor a big digital footprint. However, I also felt that I was somehow missing the big picture. I wanted someone to draw the individual contributions together, and to give an overview of the challenges and the ways in which researchers and communities are responding; in short, to synthesize the very local discussions into a more general framework. Perhaps that is impossible, given the myriad of communities. The introductory chapter (by Nicholas Ostler) could have provided such an overview, but in fact has a different focus. To be sure, Ostler does address the big picture, inasmuch as he examines how languages across the world are responding to English. He argues that the further development of language technologies will increase accessibility to “the smaller 99 per cent of the world’s languages” (p. 3). He also points out that while English is still an important global lingua franca, the factors that have facilitated English’s worldwide spread have now peaked, and English is not making inroads as a mother tongue in the home, even if it is an important language of wider communication; moreover, “speakers of robust languages have no motive to shift their home use to English just because they may use it for work or leisure” (p. 3). While this may be true as...