A four-part formula has long shaped language revival plans. It calls for a stable local community, a family who passes the language on at home, work that rewards knowing it, and a government willing to fund the effort for years. A UK research network, Revitalise, is now testing whether that formula still holds, and the people doing the work on the ground are not waiting for the verdict.
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Why a research network doubts the old recipe
The network, called Revitalise, is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. It argues that the four-part formula took shape when public life looked different from how it looks now. Societies have grown more individualistic, more mobile and more diverse. Economies have become more interconnected, and governments have taken on more layers and more outside partners.
Revitalise is putting four pointed questions to that history. Does a language still need one settled, local community behind it, when people increasingly gather around shared interests rather than a shared street? Does passing a language on at home work the way it once did, now that families organise their daily lives so differently? Does a minority language still need economic value to survive a globalised, skills-based job market? And does language policy still need the kind of steady, long-term state backing that a more fragmented style of government finds harder to give? The network is testing its answers against five cases: Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Catalonia and the Basque Country.
What the answer looks like away from a seminar room
A UNESCO seminar offered an answer of sorts, drawn from practice rather than theory. It was held in Chile, part of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages. The seminar gathered educators and officials working on Indigenous language revival across the Americas and beyond, to trade notes on what has actually worked.
Two of those notes echo Revitalise’s own doubts. Candace Galla, from the University of British Columbia, said Hawaii’s early years language nests answer a community’s needs “whether in Hawaii or far from our homeland,” rather than one fixed place. Ane Ortega, from the Basque group Garabide, told the seminar that cooperation networks matter for strengthening minority languages worldwide. She also warned that language marginalisation rarely stands apart from other kinds.
The state’s role came up too. Valtencir Mendes, UNESCO’s regional head of education, called multilingualism “a bridge towards more inclusive, resilient, diverse, and peaceful societies,” not simply a cultural asset worth protecting. José Ancán, Chile’s national deputy director for Indigenous peoples, closed the seminar by pressing governments to fund revitalisation permanently instead of project by project. He also called for coordination across agencies, rather than each running its own scheme.
The seminar also heard from people running named projects. Among them: the Rapa Nui Language Nest, the National Institute of the Mapuche Language, and Aymara-language teaching led by the educator Eva Mamani.
The Chile seminar offers one practical answer: communities held together by cooperation rather than geography, and states asked to fund the work for good rather than in bursts.
