ABSTRACT
This chapter examines endeavours to revitalise endangered languages. It focuses on issues such as expanding the discourse of revitalisation planning and arguing for revitalisation planning as consilience: a melting pot for principles from different fields in order to form a new, comprehensive theory. Language documentation is vital in all aspects of revitalisation planning. Revitalisation planning as a category in language policy is concerned with dead, dying, endangered, abandoned, undervalued, underutilised and exterminated languages. The chapter shows that the complexity of language endangerment, covering concerns about language endangerment and its contributing factors. M. Ravindranath and A. C. Cohn’s investigation of Javanese demonstrates that low intergenerational transmission among Javanese speakers has made the language endangered. Nomadic lifestyle may also be a cause of endangerment. Religious conversion may lead to language shift, even endangerment, as seen in the case of the Dayak languages in Kalimantan.
