The year 2022 will bring both an important anniversary and a new beginning. It will be the 30th anniversary of a collection of articles in the journal Language that helped consolidate and popularize the field of endangerment linguistics. And, it will also be the first year of the United Nations Decade of Indigenous Languages. This presentation will examine the intersection of these two events, in order to think through how linguists can contribute to the goals of the upcoming decade, and to positive interventions in the ongoing crisis of linguistic diversity around the world more generally. I will argue that a meaningful engagement in the UN Decade, and in support of languages more broadly, will require a critical re-examination of the precedents established 30 years ago, and of the impacts that endangerment linguistics has had. In particular, I will focus on endangerment linguistics as a discourse, rather than a field of practice. I want to suggest that as a discourse, endangerment linguistics has had harmful, though largely unintended, effects that work against the aims and practices of the field. I will describe these harms and how they are produced, and discuss options for dismantling and replacing language endangerment discourses, while maintaining some of the practices and goals of the field. I will also suggest that this rethinking of endangerment discourses will require sustained and good faith interdisciplinary dialog. As an anthropologist researching the intersections of race, colonialism, and language oppression, I will point out where I think some of those conversations could happen.

1. Rethinking the Language of
Language Endangerment
Gerald Roche (La Trobe University)
TEXT: https://tinyurl.com/4t6274wj (include bibliography)
ARTWORK: Cook Falling, Tear it Down by Travis De Vries (@TravisHDeVries)

2. LINGUISTCS
LANGUAGE
ENDANGERMENT
DISCOURSES

4. • Davis, Jenny. 2017. Resisting the Rhetorics of Language Endangerment: Reclamation through
Indigenous Language Survivance. Language Documentation and Description. 14:37-58.
• Leonard, Wesley. 2020. Insights from Native American Studies for Theorizing Race and Racism in
Linguistics. Language. 96(4): e281-e291.
• Perley, Bernard. 2012. Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages, and the Curse of
Undead Voices. Anthropological Forum. 22:133-149.
• Hassanpour, Amir. The Politics of A-political Linguistics: Linguists and Linguicide. In Robert
Phillipson (ed) Rights to Language: Equity, Power and Education. Mahwah & London: LEA, 33-39.
• Mac Ionnrachtaigh, Feargall. 2013. Language, Resistance, and Revival: Republican Prisoners and
the Irish Language in the North of Ireland. London: Pluto Press.
• McEwan-Fujita, Emily. 2006. ‘Gaelic Doomed as Speakers Die Out? The Public discourse of Gaelic
Language Death in Scotland. In Wilson McLeod (ed) Revitalizing Gaelic in Scotland. Dunedin:
Dunedin Academic Press.
• Jon Henner. On Language Deprivation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJCYRAvcQMI&feature=youtu.be
• Taff, Alice, Melvatha Chee, Jaeci Hall, Millie Yéi Dulitseen Hall, Kawenniyóhstha Nicole Martin &
Annie Johnston. 2018 Indigenous language use impacts wellness. In Kenneth L. Rehg & Lyle
Campbell (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages. Oxford: OUP, 862–83.
• Stebbins, Tonya N., Kris Eira, and Vicki L. Couzens. 2017. Living Languages and New Approaches to
Language Revitalisation Research. London: Routledge.

5. THE ELECT
By John McWhorter
Toward Racial Justice in
Linguistics
By Anne Charity Hudley,
Christine Mallinson &
Mary Bucholtz

6. LINGUISTS
OTHER
LINGUISTS

7. Roche, Gerald. 2020. Abandoning Endangered Languages: Ethical Loneliness, Language Oppression,
and Social Justice. American Anthropologist 122(1): 164-169.
2021: TIME TO DISMANTLE AND REPLACE ENDANGERMENT DISCOURSES.

8. What is discourse?
DISCOURSE WORKS DISCOURSE WORKS
ON US

10. Features of Endangered Languages Discourse
• Focus on language (not people)
• Language as thing/ stuff
• Passive language (including false protagonists)
• Victim blaming

11. Oppressive language
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than
represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state
language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified
language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the
malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of
minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and
exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots
under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom
line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are
typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or
encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

12. 3 faces of oppressive language
• Depoliticization
• Hermeneutic injustice
• Systemic trauma

13. LINGUISTS
LIKE,
JUST ABOUT
EVERYONE
ELSE

14. ALTER-
POLITICS

15. linguistics
dismantle endangered
languages discourse
& promote more just alternatives

16. Indigenous
people
International Decade of
Indigenous Languages
flourishing