Abstract
This chapter points out that assumptions about teaching an official language in school (standardized form, correct usage and spelling, formal genres and contexts) do not meet the more immediate needs of Native American communities: language as a bond between kin and community; informal and formal language use in a variety of contexts; dialect variation. Instructing a Native American language as a foreign language following a grammar-and-dictionary standard must be replaced with meaningful language acquisition in existing cultural contexts, if any language revitalization or revival is to actually happen.
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“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”
—Antonio Gramsci
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Shaul, D.L. (2014). Language Revitalization and Revival. In: Linguistic Ideologies of Native American Language Revitalization. SpringerBriefs in Anthropology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05293-9_4
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