[An-lang] ESfO conf. endangered lgs

[Gunter Senft]

Dear All!

At the sixth conference of the European Society for Oceanists (ESfO)
"Pacific Challenges: Questioning Concepts, Rethinking Conflicts" at
Marseilles, France, 6-8 July 2005 Marie Salaun and I organize a session
on endangered languages - and we would like to invite interested
colleagues to submit papers. Below you find a brief description of the
planned session and the URLs for contacting the websites of the ESfO and
of the conference organizers in Marseilles. I would highly appreciate if
you could distribute this e-mail to other interested colleagues!
Thank you very much - and hopefully I will see some of you in July next
year in Marseilles
Yours,
	Gunter

Session 10
Endangered languages - endangered cultures

Gunter Senft (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands), Marie
Salaün (University of Paris-V, France).

Of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world 4,000 can be
considered to be endangered. Both      anthropologists and linguists
have excellent arguments to argue that there is no plausibility in the
view ‘the fewer languages the better’. On the contrary, we all should
care if a language dies because – as anthropologists and linguists have
clearly pointed out and known for a long time – languages express
identity, are repositories of
history, and contribute to the sum of human knowledge. Many of these
endangered languages are spoken in the Pacific – and most of them have
not been documented yet. In this panel we would like to discuss the
cultural implications of language change in the Pacific in general and
language death and concepts of, and conflicts with, language
documentation and revitalization programmes for the various cultures in
the Pacific in particular.

Keywords: language change/culture change; language death/loss of
culture; language loss as yet another effect of globalization; language
documentation and intellectual copyright issues; language revitalization
programmes as political (hotly debated and sometimes risky) acts; the
role of anthropologists, linguists and the affected speech
community/ethnical group in documentation and revitalization programmes.

The URL of the conference organizers in Marseilles:

http://www.pacific-credo.net/esfo/index.html

The URL of the ESfO:

http://cc.joensuu.fi/esfo/


--
Gunter Senft
MPI for Psycholinguistics
PB 310
NL-6500 AH Nijmegen
The Netherlands

Tel.:
+31-(0)24-3521 911 (operator)
+31-(0)24-3521 274 (direct)
Fax.:
+ 31-(0)24-3521 300
e-mail:
gunter.senft at mpi.nl
_______________________________________________
An-lang mailing list
An-lang at anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/an-lang