Examines the question of language revitalization against the background of the use of Hebrew as the language of public life in Israel and of Irish as an official language of Ireland. Notes that the organizing principles of nationalism are complex and disputed. The different linguistic outcomes in these two countries point up the complexity and…

Focuses on language restoration in a situation where people start again to use a language as the language of the home and to speak it to newborn children after a period when these uses were extinct. Specifically considers the conditions accounting for Hebrew language revitalization and compares this situation with efforts to revitalize the Maori…

This book focuses on the practice and ideology of the languages of Israel, examining the extent to which the present linguistic pattern may be attributed to explicit language-planning activities. The chapters give balanced analyses of the history and current status of the revitalized national language, Hebrew; of the other official language,…

On the basis of detailed analyses of 10 threatened language-in-society constellations and three formerly endangered but now secure constellations, this book develops a closely argued theory of worldwide efforts on behalf of reversing language shift (RLS). It also applies this same line of reasoning to the problems of maintaining the…

Israel is fertile ground for research in multilingualism. Revitalization of Hebrew resulted in a tendency for ideological and instrumentally-motivated monolingualism to replace earlier multilingual patterns, even in the context of pressure for language shift by Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, and other languages, and Hebrew's competition with English in…