Revive et Impera – Establishing ‘Language Activism’-Research in Linguistics
Presenter(s)
Leon Grausam
Affiliation
University of Bremen
Topic
Linguistic Attitudes and Ideology
Type
Papers
Abstract
As more and more languages are being lost for good every year, we find a growing interest within academia and society to slow down this dangerous development. Over the last three decades emerged the concept of ‘language activism’ incorporating numerous understandings from a range of scholars researching a variety of languages from all over the world. Being a rather new field of interest within academia, I find that it is lacking a common ground or even understandings. One of the first comprehensive attempts is Korne (2021) with her monograph focusing the concept of language activism in Oaxaca, another careful intent of abstraction is done by Combs and Penfield (2012).
Within my project, I am establishing a common basis from existing research and frameworks and applying it to several exemplary contexts of language activism. The findings from those exemplary contexts serve, in combination with existing publications, as grounds for the formulation of a general theory of Language Activism. As there has not been any known attempt to streamline such diverse contexts of language activism into on, my investigation is pioneering and explorative drawing from a general linguistic and applied linguistic approach and different sociolinguistic and historical backgrounds of the post-colonial sphere.
Investigating several exemplary contexts of language activism, I am trying to describe and research holistically, aiming to compare and abstract commonalities and differences leading to the bigger picture of a general concept of language activism. As “to date very little has been written in our field […] about language activism as a concept” (Florey 2008: 121) this could be another important step towards the acceleration of understanding language activism movements and a steppingstone for future investigation in the respective field.
