An introduction to language endangerment. What is it? How and why does it happen? Why should we care?

Sarah G. Thomason is William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. Her previous publications include Language Contact: An Introduction (2001).

1. Introduction; 2. Why and how languages become endangered; 3. Sliding into dormancy: social processes and linguistic effects; 4. What a community loses: language loss as cultural loss; 5. What science loses: language loss as a threat to our understanding of human history, human cognition, and the natural world; 6. Field research on endangered languages; 7. Language preservation and revitalization.