The term revitalization presupposes that something is in danger or threatened – as a consequence, language revitalization is often seen as a response to language endangerment and as a way of undoing past injustices. While revitalization processes take place in the present, such processes follow long timescales and are deeply embedded in local historical contexts. Language revitalization may be experienced as positive and emancipatory, but the process can also be difficult because those attempting to reclaim their language may have to face hurts of the past, which have been passed down through generations and have consequences today. An analysis of current efforts to revitalize Kven and Sámi languages in Northern Norway sheds light on such inherent tensions in revitalization processes, concluding that it is essential to recognize tensions and contradictory forces exerted on the individuals who attempt to reclaim their language and to support them on their language journey.

Language endangerment and loss is a longstanding phenomenon affecting both non-contact languages and contact languages, but contact languages are particularly susceptible. This endangerment has greatly increased and sped up in the last century. Case studies of several languages in China and Thailand show that structural change is often more rapid during language shift. Tujia has been receding for millennia in central China; Gong may have originated during contact between speakers of a variety of Burmese and several local languages in western Thailand several hundred years ago. Several small groups in western China speak languages developed in contact between speakers of Mongolic languages, Tibetan, and Chinese in western China in garrisons set up from about 700 years ago on. The final part of this chapter discusses how communities may be assisted to react to the endangerment of their language. While linguists can document a language, it is only the speakers and the community who can decide and act to maintain it. Some of the problems leading to endangerment and the strategies to overcome them are briefly discussed.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

Forty years ago there were approximately fifty child speakers of Hawaiian in the state of Hawai‘i. Today there are thousands of speakers of all ages and a constellation of pre-K–PhD programs to promote the Hawaiian language and culture. In the early 1990s, there were no living speakers of myaamia (Miami) or Wôpanâak (Wampanoag), both North American Algonquian languages. Today, these languages, once decreed “extinct,” live in vibrant community-based education programs and family homes. Drawing on an international scholarly literature and the author’s long-term collaborative research with Indigenous educators, this chapter reflects backward and forward on the field of Indigenous language reclamation, tracing its development against the violence of settler colonialism and exploring current movements, their challenges, and the language planning and policymaking possibilities they suggest. In an age of growing raciolinguistic inequality, these movements provide both a cautionary tale and a vision of the interventions necessary to support Indigenous self-determination and sustain linguistic diversity for all.