European best practices for endangered language revitalisation
Language endangerment has become a global crisis. According to estimates only 600 of the 6,000 or so languages in the world are ‘safe’ from the threat of extinction. In Europe we have an increasing amount of expertise in language revitalisation for endangered languages. These are skills and knowledge that are transferable to other language revitalisation movements worldwide giving Europe the potential to be a leader in the field. 

However, as we develop revitalisation techniques and as they become more nuanced, sociolinguistic analysis shows those working in the field that while there have been some successes, several endangered revitalisation efforts are either failing or at least only stemming the rate of decline in speaker numbers.

The proposed research will address this last issue and using both case studies and a thematic approach examine various language revitalisation efforts so as to measure their success (or otherwise) in increasing both speaker numbers and everyday users. In short it will seek to establish what is working in endangered language revitalisation, where and how, and, in an area renowned for being poorly resourced, what is not working.