The Vanishing Languages of the Pacific Rim de Osahito Miyaoka

The Vanishing Languages of the Pacific Rim

Osahito Miyaoka

Osamu Sakiyama

Michael E. Krauss

This book presents the first comprehensive survey of the languages of the Pacific rim, a vast region containing the greatest typological and genetic diversity in the world. It includes the littoral regions of North and South America, Australasia, east and south-east Asia, and Japan, as well as the Pacific itself. As its languages decline and disappear, sometimes without trace, this rich linguistic heritage is rapidly eroding.In The Vanishing Languages of the Pacific Rim distinguished scholars report on the current state of the region's languages and provides a critical survey of the current state of the region's languages. They show what is currently known and recorded and what remains to be examined and documented. They consider which languages are the most vulnerable to extinction and what steps that can be taken to save them. Their analyses range from the regional to the local and focus on languages in a wide variety of social and ecological settings. Together they make a compelling case for research throughout the region, and show how and where this needs to be done.

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Notă biografică

Osahito Miyaoka is Professor of Linguistics, Osaka Gakuin University in Japan, having previously been chair of linguistics at Kyoto and Hokkaido Universities. He was the founding editor of Languages of the North Pacific Rim (Volume 1, 1994) and in 1999 set up the Japanese Project of Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim at Kyoto University. Since 1967 he has studied Central Alaskan Yupik, an Eskimoan language, working as an associate at University of Alaska campuses. Alongside his 'Sketch of Central Alaskan Yupik, an Eskimoan Language' in the Handbook of North American Indians (1996) and he has sought to revitalize Yupik by such activities as training bilingual teachers and preparing teaching materials. He was a visiting fellow at Research Centre of Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University in 2004. Osamu Sakiyama is Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Shiga Prefecture after serving professorship at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. He is a specialist in the Austronesian languages, working in Indonesia, Madagascar, Hainan, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea. His published work includes Studies of Minority Languages in the Western Pacific Rim (2003) and Comparative and Historical Studies of Micronesian Languages (2004).Michael Krauss is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Alaska. After devoting his student and postdoctoral years to Gaelic, Icelandic, and Faroese, Professor Krauss has spent his entire career since 1960 in the study of Alaska Native languages, all more or less severely endangered, with special attention to Siberian Yupik, documentary and comparative work with Athabaskan, and above all, Eya, which now has one surviving native speaker. His publications include Eyak Dictionary (1970) and In Honor of Eyak (1982). In 1972 he founded the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and directed it until 2000. Here he assembled the archive of Alaska Native language documentation and has, especially since 1990, worked to alert the world's attention to the enormity of the language endangerment crisis.