Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism: Language Identity, Ideology, and Practice in Dynamic Cultural Worlds [Hardcover]

Bridging the fields of youth studies and language planning and policy, this book takes a close, nuanced look at Indigenous youth bi/multilingualism across diverse cultural and linguistic settings, drawing out comparisons, contrasts, and important implications for language planning and policy and for projects designed to curtail language loss. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars with longstanding ties to language planning efforts in diverse Indigenous communities examine language policy and planning as de facto and de jure  as covert and overt, bottom-up and top-down. This approach illuminates crosscutting themes of language identity and ideology, cultural conflict, and linguistic human rights as youth negotiate these issues within rapidly changing sociolinguistic contexts. A distinctive feature of the book is its chapters and commentaries by Indigenous scholars writing about their own communities.

This landmark volume stands alone in offering a look at diverse Indigenous youth in multiple endangered language communities, new theoretical, empirical, and methodological insights, and lessons for intergenerational language planning in dynamic sociocultural contexts.

Foreword, Leanne Hinton Preface, Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Beyond Endangerment: Language and Languaging in the Lives of Indigenous Youth Leisy T. Wyman, Teresa L. McCarty, and Sheilah E. Nicholas 2. Genealogies of Language Loss and Recovery: Indigenous Youth Language Practices and Cultural Continuance Teresa L. McCarty, Mary Eunice Romero-Little, Larisa Warhol, and Ofelia Zepeda 3. Just Keep Expanding Outwards: Embodied Space as Cultural Critique in the Life and Work of a Navajo Hip Hop Artist Brendan H. OConnor and Gilbert BrowlÓ