Revivalistics

This seminal book introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration. The book is divided into two main parts that represent Zuckermann’s fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival, from the ‘Promised Land’ (Israel) to the ‘Lucky Country’ (Australia) and beyond: PART 1: LANGUAGE REVIVAL AND CROSS-FERTILIZATION The aim of this part is to suggest that due to the ubiquitous multiple causation, the reclamation of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, one should expect revival efforts to result in a language with a hybridic genetic and typological character. The book highlights salient morphological, phonological, phonetic, syntactic, semantic and lexical features, illustrating the difficulty in determining a single source for the grammar of ‘Israeli’, the language resulting from the Hebrew revival. The European i...