encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages

If we trace the history of linguistics as a science, from the realms of mere speculation
as recently as the eighteenth century to its status as a relatively exact science, with
many distinct specialisations, at the beginning of the twenty-first, and compare that
history with the history of demographic, political and economic change across the
globe over the same brief period in the span of man’s existence as a speaking animal,
then it begins to become clear why the concept of ‘endangerment’ is so new to the
realms of linguistics. This volume arose as an answer to a felt need: to document a
diversity that is fast attenuating, in a world where ‘diversity’ in other spheres – the
natural world, the cultural world and even in race relations – is a quality which has
enjoyed a heightened appreciation only within the past two generations or so.
Linguistics may be a relatively exact science now, but it is still very much a science
whose object of study moves and changes more rapidly than its practitioners can
follow it. It is also the science that is perhaps most closely bound up with the expression
of human emotion, a science where the objective is in constant collision with the
subjective. Everybody has an opinion about language to some extent, and except in
purely monolingual societies, everybody is made aware at some point of externally
imposed policies, other people’s prejudices, and an almost instinctive sense of ‘appropriateness’
about language use. Even monoglots are not free from the strictures
imposed by society on their language use; they, too, must learn to graduate and refine
their use of the different registers within a language. In more fragmented language
communities, dialect differences must be distinguished. Language is a badge of the
individual’s place in the community.
Routledge