This is an expanded version of the similarly titled seminar I gave at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in October, 2014, for all those interested.
Language recovery: Can we learn from each
other (please...)?
This
talk takes its inspiration from two key parts of my life experience. I moved
to Euskal Herria (the Basque Country) in the late ‘70s, adopted Basque as a
daily language as well as an object of study, and ever since have brushed
shoulders continually with the Basque language recovery scene. And in the early
2000s I came to a Central American country, El Salvador, and got deeply
involved in a new challenge, the recovery of the country’s only remaining
native language, already highly endangered: Nawat. One of my hopes was that I
would figure out how to transfer some of what I had learnt from the successes and
achievements of the Basque language recovery (LR) experience to a very
different context and a new fight.
