Five basic questions are posited that pertain equally to "fully alive,""partly alive," and "barely alive" languages. These three types of languages may be seen as existing along a continuum, differing in the degrees to which they can be linked to the dynamics of reward processes and institutional spill-overs that…

Other languages in Israel, such as Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian suffer from a serious lack of well-prioritized efforts in accord with their specific language planning needs. This current insufficiency of funds and effort may lead to the early demise of most Jewish languages other than Hebrew in Israel, with the exception of…

Discusses various sociological issues of bilingual education, including language and ethnicity, language planning, nonstandard versus standard, and language maintenance. Types of bilingual education are described. (EKN)

As diglossia is the societal counterpart of individual bilingualism, diethnia is the stable, societal counterpart to individual biculturalism. Diethnia requires societal compartmentalization as well as institutionally protected functional specificity. Maintenance of this division is difficult, given modern, interactive, mobile, and individualistic…

A selection of 27 papers from 1972 to publication includes works on a variety of topics whose unifying theme is the relationship of language and ethnicity. The papers are presented in six groups, on these topics: (1) what ethnicity is and how it is linked to language: phenomenological and socio-historical considerations; (2) language maintenance…

The theory and practice of assistance to speech communities whose native languages are threatened are examined. The discussion focuses on why most efforts to reverse language shift are unsuccessful or even harmful, diagnosing difficulties and prescribing alternatives based on a combination of ethnolinguistic, sociocultural, and econotechnical…

On the basis of detailed analyses of 10 threatened language-in-society constellations and three formerly endangered but now secure constellations, this book develops a closely argued theory of worldwide efforts on behalf of reversing language shift (RLS). It also applies this same line of reasoning to the problems of maintaining the…