Aboriginal Language Endangerment in Canada
The issue of language endangerment, particularly as it concerns Indigenous languages, has attracted a great deal of attention in anthropological, sociolinguistics and language planning research. This paper offers a multidimensional approach to language « endangerment », which draws on historical, political, economic and social perspectives. Based on data from a variety of Aboriginal language contexts in Canada, this paper argues (1) that language must be viewed as practice rather than as a discrete bounded « object » that can be fixed in space and time or as a living « species » that « lives » or « dies » ; (2) that linguistic resources are tied to political and economic arrangements, and as such, cannot be divorced from the historical and social contexts in which speakers live ; (3) that language endangerment needs to be viewed in terms of linguistics and cultural continuity rather than language « loss » or « death » ; and finally (4) that a key paradox arises in the promotion of Indigenous languages, namely, that speakers who rally around a homogeneous « standardized », language variety in order to gain more institutional space for their language risk excluding and marginalizing those speakers who use non-standard varieties. The paper thus highlights the social and anthropological complexity of language « modernization » and the promotion of endangered languages in institutional spheres.