ABSTRACT
There has been considerable debate concerning the role of schools in language revitalisation efforts, and in particular, whether school-based language revitalisation initiatives substantially influence community-wide patterns of language use. For instance, Joshua Fishman (1991) has argued that restoration of a threatened language essentially entails reinstating it in the home as the primary language of parent-child communication; all efforts which fall short of this critical aim represent mere short-term gains which can only bide time before the inevitable loss of the language. Thus, for Fishman, school efforts are always of limited value since they do not directly facilitate the reinstatement of home and family transmission of the threatened language.
