Page 1 of 29 Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Anthropology. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). date: 22 March 2021 Language Revitalization and Multimodality Georgia Ennis, Pennsylvania State University https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.460 Published online: 23 February 2021 Summary Linguistic and cultural shift are some of the most pressing issues facing minoritized speakers around the world. Language revitalization initiatives seek to increase the number of speakers through various pedagogical and social interventions. Language, however, is not simply a code transmitted between individuals, but comprised of a wealth of associated practices, norms, and forms of interaction in which that code has meaning. Multimodality is both an approach to the various communicative modes or semiotic fields of language, as well as a form of ethnographic practice related to media. Multimodality matters for the pedagogical methods, communicative modes, and media technologies involved in language revitalization. A multimodal approach to language revitalization includes modalities beyond a single communicative channel or form of media in recognition of the multifunctional and multidimensional nature of language. Keywords: language revitalization, language reclamation, multimodality, communicative modes, media, language shift, language endangerment, language education Introduction Speakers of Indigenous and minoritized languages around the world have brought urgent attention to the need to strengthen and maintain their languages and to reclaim those that have been silenced. 1 Language revitalization projects respond to the desires of community members to nourish their linguistic and cultural practices as well as to the concerns of scholars that increasing numbers of speakers are shifting—or have already shifted—to the habitual use of dominant languages. Sometimes thought of in terms of “reversing” shift from a dominant or matrix language back toward the threatened or target language, language revitalization can also be understood more expansively as creating new vitalities or opportunities to utilize a language. As a field, language revitalization sits at the intersection of theory and practice. The scale of language shift is sometimes hard to quantify, with estimates of numbers of languages, speakers, and qualifications of their status varying across sources. Ethnologue (Eberhard, Simons, and Fennig 2020) suggests that of the 7,117 languages spoken in the world in 2020, nearly 41 percent (2,926) are “Endangered.” This covers a wide variety of situations, including those in which there are no speakers or only a few elderly speakers remain as well as those where children’s use may be declining, but larger populations of speakers still exist among the parental generation. While 51 percent of languages are listed as Georgia Ennis, Pennsylvania State University 1