Language Endangerment, Language Rights and Indigeneity

Abstract

Bilingualism, and the ideologies associated with it, are closely tied to social, political and economic circumstances. This is both because the linguistic practices that characterize bilingualism arise out of particular social conditions, which lead people to interact in particular ways in order to live together, and because bilingual practices in turn shape new social identities and new ways of interacting socially, culturally, politically and economically. This understanding of bilingualism can shed light not only on such well-studied cases as that of French-English bilinguals in Canada or Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in Spain, but also on the lesser-known cases that are the subject of this chapter: those involving Indigenous groups around the world. These groups speak both their ‘traditional’ language and a ‘dominant’ language, associated with a current or former colonizing power. This chapter will provide an analysis of this form of bilingualism, which has arisen in situations of language contact between Indigenous and larger colonizing or dominant languages.