Applied linguistic anthropology and American Indian language renewal

Virtually all American Indian languages today are endangered. Although the Navajo Nation of over 200 000 strong now has the largest number of speakers of Navajo ever in its history, it also has the greatest number of nonspeakers. This points up the fact that even though Navajo is the most widely spoken American Indian language in North America, it has only about 60-80% of the population as speakers and is as endangered as are the languages of smaller tribes. Maintenance and renewal of tribal languages are vital concerns for Indian people and for the linguists and anthropologists working with them. The changed political and economic conditions on reservations and in urban areas brought about by political consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s and by the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act have also brought changes in the roles and resonsibilities of linguistic anthropologists. -from Author