description: This volume documents goals, challenges, and prospects in contemporary efforts to develop literacies in traditionally unwritten languages, using experiences in indigenous language development in the Americas as case studies. Written by scholars and practitioners who have in many cases devoted their careers or lifetimes to developing indigenous literacies from the bottom up, the volume gives testimony to the vitality, versatility and stability of the languages and their speakers, to the enormous confidence and energy invested in literacy as a means of preserving and extending the languages, and to the role of indigenous literacies as door opportunity and medium of expression for those who have long been marginalized in their societies. The work collected here represents an unusual confluence of research and scholarship in language planning and bilingual education, the new literacy studies, and native and Latin American studies. The contributors are well qualified to write, whether as 'insider' member of the indigenous community or 'outsider' scholar with substantial experience in the community; inclusion of both kinds of expert voices ensures a particularly reliable account. At a time when phrases like 'endangered languages' and 'linguicism' are invoked to describe the plight of the world's vanishing linguistic resources in their encounter with the phenomenal growth of world languages such as English, the cases included here offer stirring evidence that all is not lost.
language: English
title: Indigenous Literacies in the Americas
titlecomplete: Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Contributions to the Sociology of Language [Csl])
ratings_count: 1
series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language [CSL]
publisher: Walter de Gruyter