But when we move into working with communities, we have to recognize that the communities have to be the authority in their language. Actually a woman in the class I’m teaching at Sydney at the moment, a career woman, expressed this very nicely, although she was talking about something else, she was distinguishing expertise from authority. And certainly linguists because of our training we do have expertise in certain very narrow areas of language, but we don’t have the authority over what to do with that knowledge or what to do with other knowledge that the community produces. I guess for me the bottom line is languages are lost because of the dominance of one people over another. That’s not rocket science, it’s not hard to work that out. But then what that means is if in working with language revival we continue to hold the authority, we actually haven’t done anything towards undoing how languages are lost in the first place, so in a sense the languages are still lost if the authority is still lost.
Significantly focusing on the fact of linguistic authorities and expertise and it comprises that because linguists have expertise in narrow areas of language, they don’t have authority over the knowledge produced by the community. Additionally, it also denotes that language extinction is generally caused by the language dominance of communities. Considering the most substantial insights which are specified here, it can be stated that linguists need to hold authority in order for a language to revive and languages are endangered if the authority is lost.
