title: Language Reclamation
aliases: [reclamation, language reclamation, reclaim]
tags: [term]
category: Linguistics
summary: A community claiming its right to speak its language and setting its own goals for it, in response to its own needs and perspectives.

Language Reclamation

A larger effort by a community to claim its right to speak a language and to set the associated goals itself, in response to community needs and perspectives. That definition comes from linguist Wesley Leonard and it differs a bit from revitalization: revitalization tends to focus on linguistic production and speaker numbers, while reclamation also considers culture and asks why language shift happened in the first place.

See Wesley Y. Leonard, Producing language reclamation by decolonising 'language' (Language Documentation and Description, 2017).