ABSTRACT
The process of losing a language is suffused with personal sentiments and often with strong emotions, from anger and sadness to pride and shame. To explain why people abandon a language, researchers have tended to focus on political economy. But if we do not take seriously the role of emotion in this process, we risk missing clues that bridge the gap between a thousand daily, micro-level choices and the kinds of broader social changes that political economy approaches emphasize. This chapter reviews examples from studies of language contraction to consider how individuals respond emotionally to language attrition, obsolescence, and death.
