"Expert Rhetorics" in Advocacy for Endangered Languages: Who Is Listening, and What Do They Hear?

TLDR: For example, the authors argues that linguists and anthropologists may unwittingly undermine their own vigorous advocacy of endangered languages by a failure to think carefully about the multiple audiences who may hear and read advocacy rhetoric.

Abstract: During the last decade, many linguists and linguistic anthropologists have participated in a campaign of advocacy on behalf of endangered languages. Robins and Uhlenbeck (1992), Hale et al. (1992), Nettle and Romaine (2000), and Crystal (2000) are among many examples of a literature aimed at a wide audience mat includes scholars, students, and community members. The goal of this campaign is to recruit scholars to efforts at documentation and development; to increase general public understanding of language endangerment; to attract funds in support of efforts by communities to reclaim, maintain, and develop their heritage languages; and to assist communities in refining these efforts. In some ways, the campaign has been successful. The most important media discuss the issue from time to time, small grant funds to support community efforts have been developed, and scholarly interest in documenting endangered languages has certainly increased. The present article, however, is not about these successes. Instead, it critiques ways in which linguists and anthropologists may unwittingly undermine their own vigorous advocacy of endangered languages by a failure to think carefully about the multiple audiences who may hear and read advocacy rhetoric. Community language workers, speakers, and other members of local groups are both participants and overhearers in a global conversation about language endangerment in which the voices of academics and policymakers are especially prominent. How might this global conversation resonate for members of communities that are custodians of endangered languages—communities that are themselves a diverse audience? Do they find it empowering and encouraging, unintelligible and alienating, or something in between? Can they borrow from it to conduct their own advocacy, or do they prefer to use quite different discourses? What is needed is fieldwork that explores these questions specifically. In this article, I develop some questions that such work might take up by examining some of the discursive practices of the global