Wesley Y. Leonard

University of California, Riverside | UCR · Department of Ethnic Studies

Indigenous language work is manifested in a diversity of community-led responses of resilience and persistence. Indigenous persons who are reclaiming their languages have entered academia with goals of contributing to community language reclamation efforts and broader resurgence movements. Adapting Archibald's (2008) concept of storywork-experienti...

Drawing from my lived experiences as an Indigenous linguist, this article exposes and responds to epistemological racism (Kubota 2020) in the discipline of Linguistic Anthropology, which I argue institutionalizes and reproduces white supremacy. I extend Rosa and Flores’s (2017) raciolinguistic perspective, which examines the co‐naturalization of ra...

Indigenous language documentation and description efforts are increasingly designed to support community decolonisation goals, particularly with respect to implementing practices that will facilitate the use of the resulting products in revitalisation efforts. However, the field of Linguistics may inadvertently reinforce its colonial legacy (Erring...

Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for...

A guide to principles and methods for the management, archiving, sharing, and citing of linguistic research data, especially digital data. “Doing language science” depends on collecting, transcribing, annotating, analyzing, storing, and sharing linguistic research data. This volume offers a guide to linguistic data management, engaging with current...

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793652829/Contesting-Extinctions-Decolonial-and-Regenerative-Futures

By operationalizing the concept of the metalinguistic community (Avineri in Journal of Jewish Languages 5:174–199, 2017) in diverse contexts, the chapters in Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language effectively illuminate several limitations to describing and theorizing language through normative m...

Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of the twenty-first century. Languages are endangered by a number of factors, including globalization, education policies, and the political, economic and cultural marginalization of minority groups. This guidebook provides ideas and strategies, as w...

Sociolinguistic approaches to Native American languages are best conducted as part of a project of “language reclamation,” argues Wesley Y. Leonard. He discusses how framings of Indigenous languages as “endangered,” while in some ways well-intentioned, replicate the distance of language communities from scholarly research. An emphasis on reclamatio...

With origins in colonial logics and institutions, language documentation practices can reinforce colonial power hierarchies and norms in ways that work against the needs and values of Indigenous language communities. This paper highlights major patterns through which this occurs, along with their effects, and models how language documentation can b...

Storywork provides an epistemic, pedagogical, and methodological lens through which to examine Indigenous language reclamation in practice. We theorize the meaning of language reclamation in diverse Indigenous communities based on firsthand narratives of Chickasaw, Mojave, Miami, Hopi, Mohawk, Navajo, and Native Hawaiian language reclamation. Langu...

Although indigenous language reclamation programmes can empower their participants, they can also inhibit those who do not identify with the cultural values or practices that these programmes promote. I theorize that this occurs because 'reclamation' programmes evoke an essentialist notion of culture whereby participants feel pressure to act, think...

The article discusses contemporary Miami language practices in relation to prevailing notions of Native American languages as antiquated or extinct. Particular focus is given to the use of the myaamia language as spoken by modern Miami peoples. According to the author, contemporary usages of both English and myaamia demonstrate the Miami people's a...

Though increasingly hailed as a best practice for linguistic field research, the notion of “collaboration” is rarely truly inclusive of both the “researcher” and the “researched.” This paper examines common assumptions about collaboration, particularly as they pertain to endangered language research, and advocates a paradigm shift toward a model th...

Proceedings of the 2004 Stabilizing Indigenous Languages symposium

MANY MIAMI PEOPLE, myself included, experience a paradox when we speak our heritage language, which is said to be "extinct." But what does it mean to be extinct? While members of the Miami nation have a number of ways of viewing the world, I believe it is fair to assume that we all know extinct species are those where the last living example has di...

Collaboration is increasingly seen as desirable in linguistic field research, but scholarship in the fields of Linguistics and Anthropology is only beginning to explore what it truly entails (see, for example, Evers & Toelken, 2001). Collaboration, within the western academic sociopolitical culture, has become a “best practice” but in many aspects...