ABSTRACT
Reclaiming endangered languages is often framed as a community endeavour but one which requires the expertise of outsiders, most often linguists, recruited to provide technical assistance. Sometimes the linguists’ perception of their task does not align entirely with the felt needs of the community. The ideal of community-based and community-led language maintenance and development efforts is often frustrated by the mismatch between the goals of speakers of endangered languages who share a vision of restored identity and language use but who lack technical capacity on the one hand, and linguists who have the academic and technical background about language but who may feel less adept at its practical applications in daily life. Lewis and Simons’ Sustainable Use Model attempts to bridge that gap by framing the sociolinguistic complexities of language use and language revitalization in ways that allow for fuller community participation in the evaluation of their language use and in developing potential strategies for strengthening those levels of use. It provides a shared conceptual framework that is comprehensible to both technical and non-technical participants. This approach has been helpfully applied in numerous contexts globally using a community-based participatory methodology but there are still major obstacles that make it difficult for a community to move from the initial analysis and evaluation of the vitality status of their language to designing and implementing effective strategies for revitalization. That next step requires an additional set of planning and implementation resources that are even more broadly interdisciplinary.
