Book │ ENDANGERED LANGUAGES │ E. Adamou © 2024

 

 

 

Endangered Languages

By Evangelia Adamou

Copyright 2024


 

 

 

 

Description

A concise, accessible introduction to language endangerment and why it is one of the most urgent challenges of our times.

58% of the world’s languages—or, approximately 4,000 languages—are endangered. When we break this figure down, we realize that roughly ten percent of languages have fewer than ten language keepers. And, if one language stops being used every three months, this means that in the next 100 years, if we do nothing, 400 more languages will become dormant. In Endangered Languages, Evangelia Adamou, a specialist of endangered languages and a learner of her own community language, Nashta, offers a sobering look at language endangerment and what is truly lost when a language disappears from usage.

Combining recent advances from the Western scientific tradition—from the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language attrition, population genetics, and natural language processing—and insights from Indigenous epistemology, theory, and ethics, Adamou examines a wealth of issues surrounding endangered languages. She discusses where endangered languages are found, including how they are faring in a digital world, why these languages are no longer used, and how communities can reclaim languages and keep them strong. Adamou also explains the impact of language continuity on community and individual health and well-being, the importance of language transmission in cultural transmission, and why language rights are essentially human rights.

Drawing on varied examples from the Wampanoag Nation to Wales, Endangered Languages offers a powerful reminder of the crucial role every language has in the vitality and well-being of individuals, communities, and our world.

 

Adamou, Evangelia (2024) : Endangered Languages, The MIT Press, 264 pp., 5 x 7 in, 3 b&w illus. ISBN: 9780262548700, https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548700/endangered-languages/.

Ouvrage │ Understanding Language Contact │ E. Adamou, B.E. Bullock and A.J. Toribio © 2024


1st Edition

Understanding Language Contact

By Evangelia Adamou, Barbara E. Bullock, and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

Copyright 2024


 

 

 

 

Description

Understanding Language Contact offers an accessible and empirically grounded introduction to contact linguistics. Rather than taking a traditional focus on the outcomes of language contact, this book takes the novel approach of considering these outcomes as an endpoint of bilingualism and multilingualism. Covering speech production and comprehension, language diffusion across different interactional networks and timeframes, and the historical outcomes of contact-induced language change, this book:

Discusses both how these areas relate to one another and how they correspond to different theoretical fields and methodologies;
Draws together concepts and methodological/theoretical advances from the related fields of bilingualism and sociolinguistics to show how these can shed new light on the traditional field of contact linguistics;
Presents up-to-date research in a digestible form;
Includes examples from a wide range of contact languages, including Creoles and pidgins; Indigenous, minority, and heritage languages; mixed languages; and immigrants’ linguistic practices, to illustrate ideas and concepts;
Features exercises to test students’ understanding as well as suggestions for further reading to expand knowledge in specific areas.

Written by three experienced teachers and researchers in this area, Understanding Language Contact is key reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students approaching bilingualism and language contact for the first time.

Read more… 

Adamou E., B. Bullock & J. Toribio (under contract). Understanding Language ContactLondon: Routledge [Understanding Language series]

ELAD-SILDA │ /Pyi2/ et le discours au présent en birman │ San San HNIN TUN. 2023

 

 

 

 

San San HNIN TUN. 2023.

/Pyi2/ et le discours au présent en birman

San San Hnin Tun, « /Pyi2/ et le discours au présent en birman », ELAD-SILDA [En ligne], 8 | 2023, mis en ligne le 14 novembre 2023, consulté le 26 janvier 2024. URL : DOI : 10.35562/elad-silda.1317


 

 

 

 

 

 

Description

Burmese belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, in which there is a heavy presence of bound-morphemes, of which some (and not all) have one or more grammatical functions. This study attempts to describe the meaning of /pyi2/ in Burmese, which is typically described as one of the three sentence final markers for affirmative statements. Our analyses suggest that /pyi2/ expresses discontinuity between the present and the time that precedes. Based on the corpora of authentic contemporary spoken Burmese, which, to our knowledge, are still (relatively) inaccessible for linguistic analyses and to a larger general audience, our study analyzes the use of /pyi2/ by making a distinction among four cases according to the relationship that they indicate between the present and what precedes.

Author

San San Hnin Tun, lecturer at INALCO, member of LACITO-CNRS.

San San Hnin Tun, « /Pyi2/ et le discours au présent en birman », ELAD-SILDA [En ligne], 8 | 2023, mis en ligne le 14 novembre 2023, consulté le 26 janvier 2024. URL : https://publications-prairial.fr/elad-silda/index.php?id=1317

Book │ Recueil de contes bwa du Mali – Parents et enfants, quelle histoire ! │ Cécile LEGUY, Pierre DIARRA, Zufo Alexis DEMBELE & Joseph Tanden DIARRA. 2023

 

 

 

 

Cécile LEGUY, Pierre DIARRA,
Zufo Alexis DEMBELE et Joseph Tanden DIARRA. 2023.

Recueil de contes bwa du Mali
Parents et enfants, quelle histoire !

Cécile LEGUY, Pierre DIARRA, Zufo Alexis DEMBELE et Joseph Tanden DIARRA, 2023. Recueil de contes bwa du Mali, Parents et enfants, quelle histoire !, Paris: Karthala, 244 p. ISBN : 978-2-38409-109-6


Table of Content :  téléchargement (346 ko)

 

 

 

 

Description

Les contes rassemblés dans ce recueil bilingue ont tous été enregistrés entre 1994 et 2010 par les animateurs de Radio Parana, dans la région de San au Mali. Ces quinze histoires proviennent d’une recherche collective sur les dynamiques parentales en milieu rural. Elles concernent donc les relations entre enfants et parents.

On y rencontre des mères possessives et des pères jaloux, des parents déficients et d’autres plus attentionnés. Une constante semble se dégager à la lecture de cet ensemble : si les relations entre parents et enfants ne sont pas toujours paisibles, les difficultés sont le plus souvent imputables aux adultes eux-mêmes, qu’ils gâtent excessivement les enfants ou qu’ils les martyrisent.

Authors

Cécile Leguy, professeure d’anthropologie linguistique à l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle, membre du LACITO-CNRS, a notamment écrit Le Proverbe chez les Bwa du Mali. Parole africaine en situation d’énonciation (Karthala, 2001).

Zufo Alexis Dembélé, fondateur de Radio Parana, est actuellement directeur du département Journalisme et communication à l’université catholique de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (Bamako). Docteur de l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle en sciences de l’information et de la communication, il est l’auteur de Oral et virtuel (Cyr, 2008).

Joseph Tanden Diarra, docteur en histoire de l’université Paris 1, est l’auteur de différents ouvrages dont Et si l’ethnie bo n’existait pas ? Lignages, clans, identité ethnique et sociétés de frontières (L’Harmattan, 2008).

Pierre Diarra, docteur en théologie (Institut catholique de Paris) et en histoire des religions et anthropologie religieuse (université Paris 4), est membre du centre de recherches Appla&Co (Sorbonne Nouvelle). Il a notamment publié Gratuité fraternelle au cœur du dialogue (Karthala, 2021).

Cécile LEGUY, Pierre DIARRA, Zufo Alexis DEMBELE et Joseph Tanden DIARRA, 2023. Recueil de contes bwa du Mali, Parents et enfants, quelle histoire !, Paris: Karthala, 244 p. ISBN : 978-2-38409-109-6

Book │ The Tibetic Languages: an introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan │ Nicolas Tournadre and Hiroyuki Suzuki. 2023

Nicolas Tournadre and Hiroyuki Suzuki. 2023.

The Tibetic Languages: an introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan

LACITO-Publications, Linguistic Diversity 2, 1151 p., 17 maps, ISBN : 978-2-490768-08-0


Online: The Tibetic Languages (45,8 Mo)

More download options:

 

 

Description

This book is an introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan. These languages are spoken on the Tibetan plateau, in the Himalayas and the Karakoram. The Tibetic-speaking area is nowadays located in six countries: China, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. Some of the smallest languages are seriously endangered, and likely to disappear soon.

In the first chapters, sociolinguistic and anthropological aspects of the Tibetic societies are presented, as well as information about the main religions of the Tibetic area – Buddhism, Bön, and Islam.

The book includes a presentation of the main phonological and grammatical characteristics found in the Tibetic languages, and also provides information about the Tibetan script and the written languages used in the area.

A whole chapter is devoted to dialectology and the presentation of the main linguistic characteristics for each section of the Tibetic area – Southeastern, Eastern, Northeastern, Central, Southern, South-western, Western, and Northwestern.

The book also includes a historical and comparative dictionary presenting the main lexical differences between the modern languages, as well as their etymologies in Classical Tibetan. It presents the lexical correspondences between the major Tibetic languages: Central Tibetan, Tsang, Amdo, Kham, Dzongkha, Lhoke (Sikkim), Sherpa, Balti, Central Ladaks, Purik and Spiti. In order to explain the interactions with other language families, we have provided a presentation of the contact languages, which essentially belong to other Tibeto-Burman branches, as well as Sinitic, Mongolic, Turkic, Indo-Aryan, Iranic, Germanic (English) and Burushaski language families.

This work includes three appendices. The first two deal with toponymic information and provides the names of the main mountains, rivers and lakes of the Tibetic area. The third appendix includes several detailed maps presenting the locations of the Tibetic languages and dialects. It also offers maps of the natural and human environments, as well as the administrative units of the area.

Authors

Nicolas Tournadre is a linguist, member of the Academic Institute of France (iuf ), and Professor emeri- tus at Aix-Marseille University. During the last 35 years, he has conducted extensive fieldwork research in Tibet and the Himalayas, as well as in Central Asia. He has been an invited keynote speaker in numerous conferences, and has given talks on the five continents. Among his prominent publications are L’ergativité en tibétain moderne : Approche morphosyntaxique de la langue parlée [Ergativity in Modern Tibetan, mor- phosyntactic approach of the spoken language] (1996), the Manual of Standard Tibetan [with S. Dorje] (2003), Le grand livre des proverbes tibétains [with F. Robin] (2006), Sherpa-English and English-Sherpa dictionary [with L. N. Sherpa, G. Chodrak and G. Oisel] (2009), Le prisme des langues [The prism of languages] (2014) and Vegetal meditations and mineral reflections (2022).
He is a polyglot, and knows many languages affiliated to nine language families across Eurasia.

Hiroyuki Suzuki (D. Litt. in linguistics) is a lecturer in Chinese language studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He has conducted fieldwork for more than 20 years in the eastern Tibetosphere, focusing on mino- rity languages and communities. His main research interests are descriptive linguistics, geolinguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics of the languages in the Tibetosphere. He is the author of the following monographs: Dongfang Zangqu zhuyuyan yanjiu [Study on languages in the eastern Tibetosphere] (2015), 100 linguistic maps of the Swadesh word list of Tibetic languages from Yunnan (2018), and Geolinguistics in the eastern Tibetosphere: An introduction (2022). He is also the co-editor of Linguistic atlas of Asia (2021) and The Oxford guide to the Tibeto-Burman languages (forthcoming).

The book includes originals maps designed by Xavier Becker and digitized by Alain Brucelle.

      

 

Nicolas Tournadre and Hiroyuki Suzuki, 2023. The Tibetic Languages: an introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan, Villejuif, LACITO-Publications, Series Linguistic Diversity, 1151 p. 17 maps, ISBN : 978-2-490768-08-0

Chapitre d’ouvrage │ Les limites de la diversité linguistique │ In Alexandre Gefen (dir.), Un monde commun, CNRS Éditions, 2023

Alexandre Gefen (dir.)

 

Un monde commun
Les savoirs des sciences humaines et sociales

CNRS Éditions


Les limites de la diversité linguistique

Evangelia Adamou et Tatiana Nikitina


 

Si la moitié de la population mondiale ne parle qu’une vingtaine de langues, comme l’anglais, l’arabe, le chinois, l’espagnol, le français, et le portugais, il y a actuellement environ 7000 langues parlées et signées à travers le monde. Or, selon les estimations de la base de données Glotto Scope, 58 % d’entre elles risqueront de disparaître. Cela représente une perte de 4 000 langues, tou- chant aussi bien la France que des pays lointains. Un véritable bouleversement pour des millions d’humains.
Si rien n’est fait, une grande partie d’entre elles disparaîtront avant d’avoir été ni étudiées ni documentées. Se concentrer sur les langues les plus parlées aujourd’hui, laisse de côté des milliers de langues provenant de régions géographiques aussi variées que l’Afrique, l’Amérique latine, l’Asie, l’Australie et le Moyen-Orient.

Pourquoi est-il important de décrire et de documenter le plus de langues possible?

Continuer la lecture… 

Adamou, E., & Nikitina, T. 2023. Les limites de la diversité linguistique. In Gefen, A. (Ed.), Un monde commun : Les savoirs des sciences humaines et sociales. 2023 : CNRS Éditions. doi :10.4000/books.editionscnrs.57506

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