ABSTRACT
As the preceding papers have shown, the prospects and needs for language maintenance (LM) for endangered languages (ELs) differ greatly between communities. Institutional and other resources available also differ widely: from full government support and massive funding, as for Irish in Ireland (Ahlqvist), to nothing available (most Yi in China, Bradley and Bradley; Tai in Assam, Morey) or even desired (Anabaptist German, Burridge) from outside the community, to active government attempts to suppress ELs and assimilate their speakers (until quite recently Sm'algyax, Stebbins; and most Australian Aboriginal languages, Blake, Thieberger). Such practices are fortunately now a thing of the past in most of the developed world, but the aftereffects of assimilationist policies have created an ecolinguistic disaster for most minority indigenous and migrant languages there. In the developing world, minority LM understandably has a lower priority than nation-building, education, health and so on; so language shift continues to accelerate.
