🎉 New to MixCache.com? Sign up now and get $5.00 FREE CREDIT towards any ebook purchase!* Create Account →

The Myth of the Vanishing Tongue
Early Reports on Language Loss in the Americas, 1500-1900

Book Details
About this book:

The Myth of the Vanishing Tongue For centuries the story of America’s indigenous languages has been told as a tragic inevitability—doomed tongues fading before the march of civilization. *The Myth of the Vanishing Tongue* shatters that narrative, revealing how early scholars, missionaries, and statesmen constructed the very idea of language loss to serve empire, masking violence, policy, and resistance behind a veneer of natural decline.

Drawing on four centuries of archives—from Gallatin’s linguistic maps to the covert petitions of hidden speakers—this book exposes the methodological blind spots, racial theories, and bureaucratic agendas that turned vibrant speech communities into spectral “last speakers.” Yet it also uncovers a resilient counter‑archive: indigenous literacy, clandestine multilingualism, and adaptive traditions that defied the prophecies of extinction.

If you care about the true history of language, the politics of knowledge, or the enduring power of native voices, this provocative study will change how you read the past and inspire a more just approach to today’s endangered‑language movements. Dive in and discover why the vanishing tongue was never a fate—it was a myth waiting to be debunked.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Ideology of Inevitable Decline: Constructing the Vanishing Savage
  • Chapter 2 First Encounters: Early Colonial Records and Linguistic Triage
  • Chapter 3 The Missionary Dilemma: Recording and Reshaping Native Tongues
  • Chapter 4 Imperial Censuses and the Politics of Counting Speakers
  • Chapter 5 Enlightenment Philology and the Hierarchy of Speech
  • Chapter 6 Thomas Jefferson and the Ethnological Cabinet of Lost Idioms
  • Chapter 7 Early Vocabularies and the Mechanics of Linguistic Erasure
  • Chapter 8 Romantic Nationalism and the Trope of the Last Speaker
  • Chapter 9 Albert Gallatin and the Cartography of Extinction
  • Chapter 10 The Flawed Fieldwork of the Early Ethnologists
  • Chapter 11 Phonetic Inadequacy and Misheard Grammars
  • Chapter 12 Bureaucracy and Assimilation: The Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology
  • Chapter 13 John Wesley Powell and the Classification of Disappearance
  • Chapter 14 The Myth of Simplification: Uncivilized Minds and Primitive Dialects
  • Chapter 15 Boarding Schools and Coerced Silence: State Policy as Natural Fate
  • Chapter 16 Disappearing California: Salvage Anthropology on the Pacific Coast
  • Chapter 17 The Southern Cone and the Rhetoric of Araucanian Obsolescence
  • Chapter 18 Mesoamerican Resilience versus Colonial Decrees of Decay
  • Chapter 19 Daniel Garrison Brinton and Evolutionary Linguistics
  • Chapter 20 Resistance through Inscription: Indigenous Literacy and Counter-Records
  • Chapter 21 The Archival Trap: Conflating Silence with Absence
  • Chapter 22 Scientific Racism and the Biological Metaphor of Language Death
  • Chapter 23 The Turn of the Century: Franz Boas and the Salvage Paradigm
  • Chapter 24 Legacy of the Consensus: How Nineteenth-Century Bias Formed Modern Endangerment Studies
  • Chapter 25 Unbroken Continuities: Reassessing Four Centuries of Linguistic Persistence
Extended Catalog title. This book is part of our extended catalog and is sourced after you order. Usually this process takes less than an hour to a few hours. We'll email you when your ebook is ready.
Author:

Robert J. Grant

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Sample:

Read Sample

Save $13.00 (65%)
vs $19.99 paperback
Order:

Click to buy this ebook:

Buy Now
Obtained to order Secure Payment