Graphic courtesy of Living Languages Journal
By Sophie Soloway ’23
Global Editor
Scholars from across the world gathered virtually on Monday, Feb. 21 to celebrate the launch of a new language revitalization journal. The Living Language Journal, a multilingual and open-access resource platformed by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, plans to host a variety of academic and non-academic writings centering projects in the emerging field of language revitalization, which aims to re-engage with languages considered endangered by scholars and activists.
An estimated 43 percent of the world’s languages are endangered, according to UNESCO. These minoritized languages — often Indigenous and lacking in institutional support — range from being classified as vulnerable to extinct, denoting the varying degrees to which these languages have been lost.
Language revitalization, the academic field dedicated to halting these declines in language engagement, offers some solutions to these language crises through a diverse variety of programs that bring minoritized languages into the lives of their particular communities. When successful, languages once considered critically endangered can reemerge in the lives of local community members.
Some of these programs have materialized within the local Massachusetts community.
“Here in Massachusetts, the Wampanoag language was not spoken for more than 100 years. And then this incredible woman [jessie ‘little doe’ baird] decides to go into a master’s degree in linguistics, and then she creates a method to teach the language,” Luiz Amaral, University of Massachusetts Amherst associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese linguistics and editor-in-chief of the Living Languages Journal, said. “Then she started her own teaching methods in her own school and now there’s [an] immersion school in the language, and there are children who are learning Wampanoag right here in Massachusetts.”
While this academic field and its ensuing revitalization projects have increased in recognition in recent years, the field still faces major obstacles. According to Amaral, one such obstacle is a lack of connection between the many communities engaging in revitalization projects.
Without this access to the efforts of other communities, Amaral said that strategies and models developed within one group might not be able to help any number of other communities pursuing similar projects. “The problem that was identified some years ago was that people who work with language revitalization in the local communities — language activists and people who are from the communities — sometimes have limited access to what’s going on in other parts of the world or in other communities, even in the same country.”
In order to achieve its goal, Amaral noted, it was important for the Living Languages Journal to emulate a less traditional model for an academic journal.
“What we wanted to achieve was to create a place [for] people who work with language revitalization but are not necessarily connected to the academia or academic institutions … [to] not only share their experiences and the things that are working in their communities to revitalize their languages, but … also [to] find information about the process that’s been going on in other communities,” Amaral said.
To do so, the journal “combine[s] the needs of an academic journal with the needs of practitioners and people in the field” and publishes both academic research papers and personal narratives, according to Amaral. “We want the personal narratives in the chronicles, and we want more research-oriented [papers] with a structural narrative that can teach us about these initiatives [in a] more academic way,”Amaral said.
In another effort to make the Living Languages Journal easily accessible to a wide audience, the journal is multilingual, and is currently being published in English, Spanish and Portuguese. To Amaral, this choice to publish in a variety of languages resisted some values common to academia.
“If you’re talking about language revitalization, we need to be a multilingual journal. And that's not easy for the North American academia to understand. North Americans and Americans in particular have this idea that ‘if it’s not written in English, why should I care.’ … [But] academia is not centered around one language,” Amaral stated.
To Amaral, this structure represents the widespread utility of the Living Languages Journal as a model for resistant, decolonial academic work.
He said, “I think that our [model] is a very good, concrete example of something that can be done in academia that embodies the mission of decolonization.”