Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 77
occasional derogation, despite recent efforts at restitution. On the other hand, the
causes of minority language decline are sufficiently complex for it to be an oversimplification
to attribute sole agency to the ‘philosophical matrix’ of the nation
state.
4.2 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LANGUAGE
REVITALISATION
Language revitalisation assumes different forms in different contexts, varying
principally with the degree of endangerment of the particular language targeted and
its cause. In the case of Catalan, for example, revival efforts have focused relatively
successfully on the ‘normalisation’ of the language, that is, its rehabilitation from the
suppression endured under the Franco regime and its reintroduction into such
public domains as education, the media and administration.
In cases, however, where the language is substantially more endangered and
literacy less established – one thinks here of the aboriginal languages of Australia,
certain African languages or Amerindian languages – circumstances dictate more
modest objectives and the employment of different means. Recording excerpts of
the language from living speakers with a view to producing teaching materials and
a dictionary, activities undertaken on behalf of the Gumbaynggin language in
Australia (Lo Bianco and Rhydwen 2001: 406), may be all that is realistic, for
example.
Whatever the circumstance, revitalisation evidently demands considerable ideological
commitment, which immediately raises the critical question posed by
Fishman (1991: 2): why should such efforts should be undertaken in the first place?
Answers can be found in Fishman (1991, 2001a), Dixon (1997), Crystal (2000) and
Nettle and Romaine (2000), whose arguments we now review and assess.
4.2.1 Reviewing arguments for the preservation of global linguistic
diversity
Arguments for the preservation of linguistic diversity divide roughly into two clusters
that, for convenience of exposition, we can label the ecology of language cluster and
the identity cluster.
4.2.1.1 Ecology of language arguments
The starting point here is Nettle and Romaine’s observation (2000: 13) that
linguistic diversity and biodiversity are closely correlated – so much so, indeed,
that they speak of ‘a common repository … of biolinguistic diversity’. Both face
analogous threats, and both can be defended on similar environmental grounds.
For example, the loss of small indigenous languages entails the loss of the
knowledge embedded in them – specifically the ‘detailed knowledge about local
ecosystems encoded in indigenous languages’ (Nettle and Romaine (2000: 166).