The drivers of home language maintenance and development in indigenous communities

Abstract

Indigenous and tribal peoples represent 5% of the 7.7 billion world population, with roughly 370 million worldwide distributed over 70 countries and accounting for the bulk of the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity. According to UNESCO (n.d.) and The World Bank (2019), while indigenous peoples own, cultivate or occupy almost a quarter of the world’s surface, they embody 15% of the world’s extreme poor and face problems of marginalization and other human rights violations. Indigenous people speak roughly three quarters of the approximate 7000 known spoken languages today (McCarty, Nicholas and Wigglesworth 2019). Despite the fact that language rights for indigenous and tribal peoples are enshrined in articles 13 and 14 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, indigenous languages across the world continue to have a minoritized status, despite efforts from indigenous communities, regional and in some cases even national governments to secure policies and practices to turn this status around (Annamalai and Skutnabb-Kangas, this volume). The development and maintenance of indigenous languages exhibit great variability around the globe. It is driven by multiple factors such as numbers of first and second language speakers, access to intercultural bilingual education, and adequate language policies and their implementation (Lo Bianco 1987; McCarty, Nicholas and Wigglesworth 2019; Coronel-Molina and McCarty 2016).