2025-26 Abstract (with Faculty Fellow Lenore Grenoble) - Linguistic Futures: Centering Language Shift and Revitalization in Sociolinguistic Theory

Recent decades of political activism aiming to revitalize endangered languages have created linguistic change, and a new linguistic future. The loss of languages used to be expected, even welcomed in the name of modernity or a myopic definition of “progress.” It is now clear that, far from assuring better communication, the diminishing number of languages is a result and sign of neglect, devaluation and discrimination against their speakers who are often coerced into shifting. Half of the roughly 6500 languages spoken today are "endangered." Colonization, migration, war and other changes in power relations lead to language shift, as do the centralization projects of states.  The last half century has seen vibrant, organized efforts by speakers and their allies to reverse language shifts. These developments challenge mainstream (socio)linguistic theory, which has long sidelined shifting languages as mere “deficit,” decay, and irregularity. Our goal is to mobilize this new evidence, paired with new methods, to put shifting languages at the center of (socio)linguistic theory and thereby rethink core theoretical questions, specifically: the nature of language community and its (non)boundedness; grammatical complexity in language change; regularity in social meaning; the category of “native speaker.” We aim to develop these issues in a collaborative project of twenty scholars who study shifting languages and their contexts. They and their field-sites are chosen from around the world for contrast and comparison. In two workshops over two years, with papers submitted in advance and revised in between, we aim for a volume of linked, theoretically integrative essays.

Bio:

Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics. Her latest book, (with Judith T. Irvine), Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, discusses the social meanings and semiotics of linguistic variation; it won the 2021 Sapir Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Gal is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS and SSRC Fellowships. She is the author of Language Shift, and has written about the political economy of minority languages in Austria and Hungary, language revitalization, language ideologies, and standardization. Her other themes include the politics of gendered language and translation. She is currently working on the effects of far-right discourses on language and ethnic change in Eastern Europe.