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Why Language Documentation Matters pp 51–67Cite as

Supporting Linguistic Vitality

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Abstract

This chapter reviews efforts at supporting linguistic vitality, including the use of surveys to raise consciousness about the status of language use; catalogs that provide basic facts about low resourced languages; the language archiving movement, which provides state-of-the-art repositories for language materials; funding and other research activities to support language documentation; and language teaching and other language revitalization activities.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Prof. Shobhana L. Chelliah

Authors
  1. Prof. Shobhana L. Chelliah
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shobhana L. Chelliah .

Questions for Discussion

Questions for Discussion

  1. 1.

    How are the methods of language description used in language documentation?

  2. 2.

    How can social media be used to mobilize language documentation for revitalization?

  3. 3.

    Explore a language archive. What languages are represented? How user-friendly is the archive?

  4. 4.

    Explore Glottolog and ELCat. Compare the records for a particular language. If your institution pays for Ethnologue, you could also to explore that database.

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Chelliah, S.L. (2021). Supporting Linguistic Vitality. In: Why Language Documentation Matters. SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66190-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66190-8_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66189-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66190-8

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