Linguist's Library

  The Influence and Importance of Documentary Linguistics on Revivalistics In his 2021 paper Revivalistics is Not Documentary Linguistics , Israeli linguist Zuckermann distinguishes (in no uncertain terms) between the roles of revivalists and documentary linguists, and places the latter as explicitly “ineffective” in a revival situation. Yet how can one revive a language that is undocumented? The following endeavours to explore the ways in which documentary linguistics (and the linguists within of this field) actually play an invaluable role in a language revival movement, beginning with a discussion on the value of language documentation. Different languages are documented to different extents. The fact of the matter is that languages which are more prominently spoken, and more prestigious in the perspective of the common people, are more likely to have greater extent of documentation. For example, Talbot (2022) states that the anglophone U.S. produces roughly 2,700 newly pu...