Professor: Allison Taylor-Adams

credits 4.00

• CRN 22631: Monday & Wednesday, 4:00-5:20pm @ ANS 192

Language is part of everything we do, and each individual language has a metaphorical life of its own. Many people have heard terms such as “dead language,” “language death,” and “language revitalization.” In this course, we will talk about the stages and characteristics of “life” for a language. In doing this, we will draw on multiple different academic subdisciplines, including sociolinguistics, philology, anthropology, and language revitalization. We will look at real examples of languages, from all over the world and throughout recorded human history, in order to explore the multidimensional nature of human language. We will also use the life stories of languages to investigate critical issues of migration and intercultural exchange, inequity and discrimination, colonial violence and Indigenous resistance, personal identity and social justice.