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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The World’S Languages In Crisis (Redux): Toward A Radical Reimagining For Global Linguistic Justice, Gerald J. Roche
The World’S Languages In Crisis (Redux): Toward A Radical Reimagining For Global Linguistic Justice, Gerald J. Roche
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis
The world’s languages are in crisis: intergenerational transmission of around half the world’s languages is collapsing. I argue that to understand and intervene in this situation, we need to radically reimagine what it means to call it a crisis. We need to think about this crisis not simply as an acute emergency (which it is), but also in Antonio Gramsci's sense of a period in which ‘the old is dying but the new cannot be born’. In this sense, our present moment of crisis is one in which language oppression and language revitalization co-exist in dynamic tension. To analyze this …