Language revitalization refers to the work people and communities undertake to maintain the use of their languages–signed and spoken–in spite of governments, educational systems, and societal attitudes that sideline or actively oppose people’s linguistic rights. This marginalization has contributed to an unprecedented scale of language endangerment across the world. With our trip, we aim to provide an opportunity for students to not just learn about the topic of language revitalization but to also contribute to the important language revitalization work being done by communities in the Bay Area. We welcome participants regardless of background knowledge, whether you’ve never heard of language revitalization before or you’re a language revitalization practitioner yourself.

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The maintained knowledge and use of ancestral languages has a variety of empirical benefits, being associated with positive mental health, physical health, and educational outcomes (Whalen et al. 2022). Thus, language revitalization is relevant to a wide variety of disciplines and topics, such as public health and education policy; we hope to explore language revitalization’s relevance to fields that at first glance may seem unrelated.

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We take a broad view of language revitalization, encompassing Indigenous language movements, heritage language education (even in languages that aren’t necessarily endangered), etc. and including endangered languages that are considered by some to be varieties of other languages.

Citations:
Whalen, D.H.; Melissa E. Lewis; Stefanie Gillson; Brittany McBeath; Bri Alexander; and Kate Nyhan. 2022. Health effects of Indigenous language use and revitalization: a realist review. International Journal for Equity in Health 21.169. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-022-01782-6