Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond

The first thing that draws the reader’s attention when picking up Revivalistics is that it does not use terms such as “language endangerment”, “endangered languages”, or “language death” on its cover. It seems that many have grown weary of the alarming tone that has accompanied the topic over the past decades (Hill 2002). The field has moved on, and quantification of languages in danger of extinction, decreasing numbers of speakers, or hyperbolic statements such as that the survival of humanity may be at peril if languages are not saved have given way to more nuanced, situated, and user-centered accounts. This is a welcome development. The field of study has matured. There are good reasons for a change in tone, and in structure. To start with, the study of endangered languages has grown into a large-scale field and no longer needs to call for attention in the way it had to in the 1990s (Krauss 1992). At the same time, the study of language endangerment has developed unevenly, with language documentation and language archiving witnessing a notable upsurge and new developments, while the field of sociolinguistics has largely remained centered on the by now classical works of Gal (1979), Dorian (1981), and Fishman (1991, 2001).