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Workshop on Africa's Response to Language Endangerment
December 2-4, 2010
302 Pugh Hall
Organizers: James Essegbey, Brent Henderson, Fiona McLaughlin, Eric Potsdam, Frank Seidel
Program (PDF)
The central goal of this workshop is to bring together experts working on language documentation to debate whether language endangerment in Africa differs from that in other parts of the world, and whether such differences merit an Africa-specific approach to documentation. For instance, while colonial languages have played a central role in endangering indigenous languages in Australia and the Americas, researchers disagree on whether this has been the case in Africa. Another issue that is debated is role of dominant, indigenous regional languages in Africa, and whether they affect endangered languages in the same way that colonial languages do.It has been claimed, for instance, that such languages are acquired as additional, rather than replacive, languages in what is a highly multilingual society (McLaughlin 2009, but see Mous 2003). In some contexts, however, the regional languages are closely related to the local languages, making it difficult to determine the degree of influence. For example, determining whether a lexical item has been borrowed from a regional language or simply inherited from a common ancestor may be impossible. Imperfect second language acquisition is also common in the case of the regional languages, sometimes resulting in code-mixing and rapid structural changes that can lead to language endangerment, as noted by Bamgbose (1997) for Yoruba, and McLaughlin (2009a,b) for Wolof. There will be presentations by students of the Language Documentation course.
We would like to thank the Center for African Studies (CAS) for providing the bulk of the funding for this workshop. Our sincere thanks also go to the Office of Research, the France-Florida Research Institute, the Linguistics Department and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.
