New at Heyday | About Heyday | Catalog | Magazines | How to Order | Contact Us
Back to California Indian | Back to Guides & Reference

Leanne Hinton with Matt Vera and Nancy Steele

Trade paper, 144 pages, (7 x 10), with b&w photos
ISBN: 1-890771-42-2, $15.95

Amid worldwide accounts of dying languages, author Leanne Hinton and a group of dedicated language activists are doing something about it: they have created a master-apprentice language program, a one-on-one approach that has been remarkably successful in ensuring new speakers will take the place of those, often elderly, who are fluent in an endangered language.

How to Keep Your Language Alive is a manual for students of all languages, from Yurok to Yiddish, Washoe to Welsh; complete with exercises that can—can and should—be done in the most ordinary of settings, written with great simplicity and directness by a member of the linguistics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews:

"A magnificently lucid and inspirational doorway to the world of human communication, and a rallying cry for language preservation."—Peter Nabokov, author and anthropologist

Author Biography:

Leanne Hinton, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of several books, including Flutes of Fire (Heyday, 1994) and The Green Book of Language Revitalization (Academic Press, 2000), and she is a co-founder of Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.