Language reclamation: preliminaries

I use the term language reclamation specifically to refer to language revival in situations where the language is no longer spoken and little is known orally within the community (Amery, 1994: 146; SSABSA, 1996a; Mercurio & Amery, 1996: 48). The term refers to attempts to relearn a language from material recorded in another era, when the language was spoken. The term reflects the politics of Indigenous rights. As the quotation above indicates, such a revival is associated with the reclaiming of identity and culture from which a people have been dissociated. The term ‘language reclamation’, used in this way, was coined by Mary-Anne Gale and myself in 1992. Prior to that I had been using the term language resurrection in relation to Kaurna, but rejected this term because of its inherent view of such languages as ‘dead’ or ‘extinct’, and its unwelcome religious overtones. Perhaps others have used the term independently of my usage, even before 1992. Dick & McCarty (1997) use both ‘reclaiming’ and ‘renewal’ in relation to Navajo in the title of their paper. Van Heerden (1991) talks of militant Black writers in South Africa ‘reclaiming’ Afrikaans ‘as their personal language’ and as ‘the language of Liberation’, in a conscious effort to break the stigma of apartheid. This use is quite different from my own.

Some writers (e.g. Paulston et al., 1994: 92) use the term language revival in a narrow, restrictive sense:

I use it, however, as most other writers do, as a cover term both for situations in which a language is undergoing a resurgence and for measures taken to extend the domains of usage of a language, increase the number of speakers or indeed to reintroduce a language after it has ceased to be spoken.