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Paper short abstract

Uncertainties and doubts about local language and culture within Europe reveal a need to question our assumptions about what language actually is. Investigating the ways that language functions in social life, linguistic anthropology offers new insights and hopes for strengthening local community.

Paper long abstract

Migration and European integration have called into question the sustainability of local social life and cultural identities. This paper argues that uncertainties and doubts about the situation of languages within wider European and global publics are often inspired by understandings and language ideologies which are at odds with the ways that language actually functions in social life. Discourses of "endangerment" and "(un-)sustainability" as well as policies they inspire, need to be based on better understandings of how language, as an intertwined set of cultural and semiotic systems, functions in society. The situation of Irish exemplifies what can happen when policies and public discourse are based on unthinking and reductionistic understandings of language: the grounding of language within actual social life is lost to view. A linguistic anthropological approach brings to light new uncertainties, but also new understandings of where the life and health of language and culture reside.