For Wednesday 2/16, please read the following two articles, both of which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website:

Krauss, Michael. 1992. The world’s languages in crisis. Language 68: 4-10.

Hale, Ken. 1992. Language endangerment and the human value of linguistic diversity. Language 68: 35-42.

Both of the articles address the topics of language endangerment and language death:  the Krauss article presents an overview picture of imperiled languages across the world, while the Hale article delves more deeply into what exactly is lost when a language disappears.

For this Friday’s (2/11) and next Monday’s (2/14) class, please read the following article, which can be downloaded from the Readings section of this website:

Bickerton, Derek. 1983. Creole Languages. Scientific American 249(8): 116-122.

For this Wednesday’s (2/9), please read chapters 10 and 19 of your Language Myths textbook.  Both of these chapters are concerned with the question whether some languages are more complex than others.

As an extra bonus, you might enjoy listening to the podcast entitled “There are no primitive languages” from Monica Macauley (a linguist at University of Wisconsin-Madison), which addresses the same issues.  A link to the podcast can be found on the following webpage:

http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~awanner/podcasts/podcasts.htm

On Monday 2/7, we will return to the question of whether the United States is in need of an official language.  Although there is no new reading for Monday, I would like you to review the various official-English readings that were assigned last week, in preparation for our discussion.

In preparation for Friday’s guest lecture on signed languages and the deaf community in America (given by Joan Nash, one of our resident experts here at BU), please read the following two articles, which provide a historical overview of signed languages and attitudes towards the deaf community:

Perlmutter, David. 1986. No nearer to the soul. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4: 515-523.

Perlmutter, David. 1991, March 28. The language of the deaf. The New York Review of Books.

(As usual, both readings can be downloaded as PDFs from the “Readings” section of this website.)

For Wednesday 2/2, please read the following, both of which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1997, June 30. Lingo jingo: English-Only and the new nativism. The American Prospect.

Rodriguez, Richard. 1980. An education in language. In L. Michaels and C. Ricks (eds), The State of the Language, 129-139. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Also, two scheduling notes:  first, we are currently one day behind the schedule given on the syllabus.  Second, with the anticipated “weather event” for the middle of this week, there is a very real possibility that our Wednesday meeting may be canceled.  In the event that our class is indeed canceled, I will be in touch with a revised plan for the upcoming weeks.

Next week, we will continue to look at multilingualism, but shift our attention to questions of national language policy and official languages.  In particular, we will spend some time considering language policy in America, in the context of the “official-English” movement.  In the “Readings” section of this website, I’ve posted a collection (PDF) of primary source materials concerning the “official-English” movement–please read these for Monday 1/31.

For this Wednesday and Friday, please read the following book chapter, which can be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.  (Note that the “Readings” section is password-protected–you can find the password on the first page of the course syllabus.)

Grosjean, François. 1982. Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism, Chapter 1 (‘Bilingualism and the World’). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.