Special Issue on Indigenous Languages: Introduction

Abstract

Special Issue on Indigenous Languages: Introduction Sarah G. Thomason The year 2019 was established as the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL) by the United Nations General Assembly. The goal was to call attention to the risks faced by indigenous languages all over the world and to promote the maintenance and revitalization of threatened languages in order to reduce the likelihood of a catastrophic global loss of linguistic diversity. This is a two-part Special Issue of Language that highlights the contributions made by linguists to understanding the history, structures, and use of indigenous languages, as reflected in the Linguistic Society of America’s flagship journal Language. The issue is divided by date: articles published in the twentieth century, from the journal’s first volume in 1925 through volume 75 (1999), are in the first volume, and twenty-first-century articles, from volume 76 (2000) through volume 95 (2019), are in the second. This introduction covers both.1 In spite of the chronological imbalance, the two volumes contain roughly the same number of articles. The uneven number of Language issues covered by each volume is meant to emphasize the fact that more and more linguists have been investigating indigenous languages in recent decades. The selection of articles to include in the Special Issue was based on two main criteria: geographical distribution of the languages represented in the articles and topical distribution across linguistic subdisciplines. An additional criterion, especially in the twentieth-century volume, was authorship; many of the most illustrious names in our field appear here. No author appears more than once, though a few of the languages do. All but a very few of the languages included are endangered, and one of them, Chitimacha (Swadesh 1934), lost its last native speaker in 1940. At least two of the languages that are not classed as endangered, Huichol (Hamp 1957) and Seri (Baerman 2016), are ‘vulnerable’ according to UNESCO’s Atlas of the world’s languages in danger (Moseley 2010). In the first several decades of the Linguistic Society of America, the overwhelming majority of Language articles on indigenous languages focused on languages spoken in the United States and Canada; in second place were languages of Latin America. Indigenous languages elsewhere in the world were represented very sparsely indeed in the journal. Global coverage has expanded greatly in the last few decades, but the Americas still predominate. Together, in a pared-down selection from the total list of Language articles with indigenous language material, the Americas accounted for 136 languages, while only forty-two languages represented the rest of the world. Given the early dominance of New World languages, the twentieth-century volume mostly comprises articles on languages of the Americas, especially North America, so that geographical balance in the Special Issue has been achieved (though only partially) by a concentration in the twenty-first-century volume on languages of other continents. The Special Issue contains twenty-two US and Canadian languages, fourteen Latin American languages, eight languages of northern Eurasia, five African languages, three Australian [End Page e474] languages, two languages of Oceania (one of which, Chamorro (Chung 1983), is spoken on Guam, a US territory), two languages of Papua New Guinea, and one United Kingdom language. Two of the languages included in the Special Issue are mixed languages: Chinook Jargon (Jacobs 1932), a pidgin language that flourished in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, British Columbia) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Light Warlpiri (O’Shannessy 2013), a bilingual mixed language that emerged very recently in Australia. Unsurprisingly, the most-discussed topics are core areas of linguistic structure: morphology and syntax (twenty-nine articles) and phonetics and phonology (fifteen articles). Nine articles focus on endangered languages, seven of them in the set edited by the late Ken Hale (Hale et al. 1992). Other areas represented in the Special Issue are historical linguistics (six articles), semantics (three articles), sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics (two articles each), and general description (two articles, both from the journal’s earliest years). The specific topics range widely, including articles comparing language groups (both historical and typological studies, eight in all) and articles on glottalized continuants (Sapir 1938), language death (Dorian 1978), switch-reference (Austin 1981...