Memorialising loss in dead and dying languages : the last speaker and other strategies

Vigers, Richard Charles (2006) Memorialising loss in dead and dying languages : the last speaker and other strategies. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

Using theorisations of cultural memory and sociolinguistics this research explores the relationship between research into language loss and the role of language loss in the cultural memory in the former speech community.  It uses the historical development of the production of knowledge from these encounters to understand the persistence of the notion of language ‘death’.

The analysis is based on three historical and one contemporary case studies; two shorter ones examining the processes of memory construction around the loss of Cornish (Barrington 1775) and of Dalmatian (Bartoli 1906) and two more extensive explorations using ethnographic field research and textual analysis with reference to Ubykh in Turkey (especially in the work Dirr, Dumézil, Vogt and Charachidzé) and Breton in France including published documentation, fictional representations and print and television journalism.  The cotemporary study of Breton further examines the ongoing problematisation of language death and the last speaker in the context of the proliferation of memory work and the digital technology revolution.

This research highlights the pivotal role of the researcher in defining the scenario of language death and in influencing the subsequent construction of memory of the language, both within and beyond the speech community.  It historicises the concept of ‘saving’ a language and traces the different outcomes for memorialisation from monuments of exhaustive scholarship to revival, heritage and ornament.  The inference is that the persistence of these beleaguered identities is due, in no small part, to language loss as a traumatic but defining event.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics