System of indicators

[Anneli Sarhimaa]

Dear friends of endangered languages,

the EU-FP7presenting and critically discussing the so far newest tool for assessing the degree of language maintenance and endangerment, the European Language Vitality Barometer (EuLaViBar). The barometer was created on the basis of 12 case studies concerned with Finno-Ugric minority languages spoken in Europe. The research was conducted by the international, interdisciplinary EU-FP7 project ELDIA (European Language Diversity for All, see www.eldia-project.org) in 2010-2013. The main "products" - i.e. the European Language Vitality Barometer, a data bank involving all the new empirical data gathered from the 12 Finno-Ugric speech communities and an abridged version of the Comparative Report - are since yesterday available as open-access documents via the following links:

The link to the Barometer Toolkit is  http://www.eldia-project.org/index.php/eulavibar.

The link to information on Data bank is: 
http://www.eldia-project.org/index.php/eldiadata.

And the link to the short version of the Comparative Report (the full version will be published as a book in 2014) is: https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail_object/o:304815.

In the coming weeks, we'll publish on the website the 12 detailed case-specific reports as well; these are monographies consisting of 160 to 300 pages each and provide up-to-date information on the investigated Finno-Ugric minority languages. The full reports are written in English but there also will be an abridged version of each report in the involved minority language and the respective majority language as well.

Initially the project grew from the acute need of re-evaluating and re-conceptualising multilingualism in today's world characterized by the radically changed critical functions and social positions of languages, and from the urgent need of finding effective ways to support the traditional and the new forms of language diversity in Europe and beyond. The project outcome ─ the EuLaViBar ─ is a tool which illustrates and summarises quantitative survey data, as well as a thematic map which can be used to “guide” future interventions aiming at promoting the maintenance of endangered languages. The paper will first briefly introduce the theoretical framework, then give an overview of the method of creating a barometer for a given language, and close with an assessment of the strengths and the weaknesses of the implemented research methods and the tool itself.