This book provides an overview of the issues surrounding language loss. It brings together work by theoretical linguists, field linguists, and non-linguist members of minority communities to provide an integrated view of how language is lost, from sociological and economic as well as from linguistic perspectives. The contributions to the volume fall into four categories. The chapters by Dorian and Grenoble and Whaley provide an overview of language endangerment. Grinevald, England, Jacobs, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer describe the situation confronting threatened languages from both a linguistic and sociological perspective. The understudied issue of what (beyond a linguistic system) can be lost as a language ceases to be spoken is addressed by Mithun, Hale, Jocks, and Woodbury. In the last section, Kapanga, Myers-Scotton, and Vakhtin consider the linguistic processes which underlie language attrition.

Western language ideologies and small-language prospects /Nancy C. Dorian -- Toward a typology of language endangerment / Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley -- Technical, emotional, and ideological issues in reversing language shift : examples from Southeast Alaska / Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer -- Mayan efforts toward language preservation / Nora C. England -- A chronology of Mohawk language instruction at Kahnawà:ke / Kaia'titahkhe Annette Jacobs -- Language endangerment in South America : a programmatic approach / Colette Grinevald -- The significance of diversity in language endangerment and preservation / Marianne Mithun -- On endangered languages and the importance of linguistic diversity / Ken Hale -- Living worlds and cartoon translations : Longhouse "texts" and the limitations of English / Christopher Jocks -- Documenting rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive loss in language shift / Anthony C. Woodbury -- Impact of language variation and accommodation theory on language maintenance : an analysis of Shaba Swahili / André Kapanga -- A way to dusty death : the Matrix Language turnover hypothesis / Carol Myers-Scotton -- Copper Island Aleut : a case of language "resurrection" / Nikolai Vakhtin.