Knowra Language preservation Language preservation Language preservation comprises efforts to maintain a language’s use, transmission between generations, and documentation, especially when its speakers or domains of use are declining.
Language revitalization : Collective efforts to increase the use, learning, and intergenerational transmission of a language. It turns preservation aims into renewed language use across homes, schools, and public life.
Language shift : A process in which a community increasingly uses one language instead of another across generations or domains. Declining transmission and domains of use often begin with a shift toward a dominant language.
Indigenous language sovereignty : The right of Indigenous peoples to control their languages, language education, and related cultural knowledge. It centers community authority over preservation goals, materials, and teaching.
Language maintenance : The continued use of a language by a community despite pressures favoring another language. Maintenance emphasizes sustaining existing use, while preservation can also include documentation and recovery.
Immersion education : An educational approach in which learners study subjects through sustained use of a target language. It creates settings where learners acquire the language through regular, meaningful use.
Colonialism : A system in which a power controls another territory and its people, often reshaping institutions and culture. Colonial administrations and institutions often restricted Indigenous languages and elevated colonial ones.
Tūhoe language revitalization : Community-led efforts by Tūhoe people to strengthen te reo Māori within their iwi and region. It illustrates how a people can organize language transmission around local identity and institutions.
Language death : The loss of a language when no one retains it as a means of communication. It is the outcome preservation efforts seek to prevent or, after loss, address through reclamation.
Language nests : Early-childhood programs where young children learn a language through interaction with fluent older speakers. These programs connect elders’ fluency with children’s language acquisition in daily activities.
Residential schools in Canada : Government-funded institutions that separated many Indigenous children from their families and suppressed their languages and cultures. Their language prohibitions disrupted intergenerational transmission in many Indigenous communities.
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