Language 'revitalisation'

[Margaret C Sharpe]

Hi Piers and all, I won't give any judgement on online petitions, but  
you make a point about them being so easy and conscience-appeasing!

But I'd endorse your other concerns about language endangerment issues  
and whether action on some of these are not doing what they are  
claimed to/wanted to/supposed to do.

I was linguist at one community for some 7 months last year, and felt  
what we were doing was not very effective and in some cases counter- 
productive:  classes of young school pupils found the lessons fun, but  
the middle and high school pupils were, in some cases, bored, or not  
challenged enough, or disruptive in class.  I have to add that one of  
the language teachers has been happy with what has been done in the  
past, and that the language teachers have learnt how to spell and  
write down their own languages.  But the very small time allowed in  
school for traditional language (30 minutes per week per age group)  
was clearly not producing speakers of the language, or even thorough  
recall of the words taught. in many cases.

I'm either the pessimist or the realist on this issue.  But others,  
who like me, have been nibbling at this issue for 3-4 decades tend to  
agree with my pessimism on language revitalisation.

Margaret Sharpe