Minimal English and revitalisation education: Assisting linguists to explain grammar in simple, everyday words

Abstract

Whilst language revitalisation projects must be community directed in order to be sustainable, linguists often play an advisory role, and in this capacity, one of their main tasks is to help develop educational resources such as learners' dictionaries and community grammars. This requires explaining aspects of language structure in a way which is accessible from the community's point of view. This chapter will consider how Minimal English can address the communication gap between linguists and community members in the field of language education. It will present three exploratory studies illustrating the ways in which part of speech terms ('noun', 'verb' and 'adjective'), the concepts of 'root' and 'suffix' and the idea of different "forms" of a word or suffix can be explained in Minimal English texts.