[Endangered-languages-l] Prehistory of language revitalization?

[Stephen Morey]

Dear Jussi,


I am aware of efforts by the Tai Ahom community of Assam State, Northeast India, to revitalize their language and culture over approximately the last 250 years.


In the late 18th century a pair of manuscripts called Bar Amra and Loti Amra (these are Assamese names) were compiled as lexicons of Tai Ahom words with translations into Assamese. The best known version of the Bar Amra was copied in 1795 (not clear if this is the original version or copy of an earlier text), written in Tai Ahom script with the Assamese words rendered (as best as possible) into Tai Ahom. It is said that the motivation for doing this was to help preserve the language, and preserve the knowledge of words necessary to read the Ahom manuscripts. The spoken language seems to have ceased being used before 1825. Most of the manuscripts still remain untranslated.


Another version of the Bar Amra was used as the basis for the Ahom Online Dictionary (website below)


I can give more references on this but I will not have a good internet access before Saturday.


Stephen


Stephen Morey
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Centre for Research on Language Diversity
La Trobe University
Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=SMorey<http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/morey.htm>

Language data website: http://sealang.net/assam
Dictionary websites: http://sealang.net/ahom;  http://sealang.net/singpho; http://sealang.net/phake

Linguistic data archived at::
DoBeS:  http://www.mpi.nl/DoBeS and follow a link to projects, then Tangsa, Tai and Singpho in North East India
ELAR: http://elar.soas.ac.uk
PARADISEC:  http://www.paradisec.org.au

North East Indian Linguistics Society: http://sealang.net/neils
________________________________
From: Endangered-languages-l <endangered-languages-l-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Ylikoski Jussi <jussi.ylikoski at uit.no>
Sent: 18 November 2014 22:11
To: ENDANGERED-LANGUAGES-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: [Endangered-languages-l] Prehistory of language revitalization?


Dear colleagues,


According to the received view, the history of modern language revitalization seems to begin from the Hebrew and Gaelic revivals in the 19th century. The motives and impact factors of people such as Pa?ini, Gutenberg and Herder aside, and disregarding the rise of European nation states and their national languages, I would be interested to know whether there have been less known - and presumably less successful - early ("pre-Hebraic" and "pre-Gaelic") collective efforts that could be characterized as language revitalization in a sense of consciously and systematically trying to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Anywhere in the world?


Needless to say, I would be grateful for any references to published work on this issue.


Best regards,


Jussi



http://ansatte.uit.no/jussi.ylikoski/
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