James Costa is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France.

• Acknowledgements Preface 1. Researching language revitalisation from a critical sociolinguistic perspective 1.1. Saving authentic languages vs. inventing new ones1.2. Language revitalisation1.3. Language revitalisation in Academic Work1.4. Revitalising Occitan in Southern France: Occitania and Provence1.5. Positioning1.6. Critical sociolinguistics1.7. Volume outlineRevitalising 2. Language revitalisation: a genealogy 2.1. Introduction: investigating language revitalisation2.2. The Precursors: antiquarians and French Revolutionaries2.3. North American scholarship: anthropology and sociolinguistics2.4. Descriptive linguistics and language endangerment2.5. Language revitalisation and linguistics2.6. Language documentation and description established3. Defining language revitalisation 3.1. Introduction3.2. Defi ning revitalisation3.3. Establishing a discourse of diagnosis and remedy3.4. Critical approaches to endangerment and revitalisation3.5. Conclusion4. Revitalisation as recategorisation 4.1. Introduction4.2. Rethinking revitalisation as a social movement4.3. Revitalisation as a conscious effort to implement social change4.4. Revitalisation and culture change in later debates4.5. The study of language revitalisation movements4.5.1. Proposition 1: language revitalisation, as a social movement, is about groupness4.5.2. Proposition 2: language revitalisation as the consequence of social contact4.5.3. Proposition 3: language revitalisation is fundamentallya struggle over classifi cations4.5.4. Language revitalisation is ultimately not about language or even about past linguistic hierarchies4.6. ConclusionConflict in the Occitan South of France 5. Does context stink?5.1. Introduction5.2. The Predicament of contextualising: does context stink?5.3. Language revitalisation in the South of France: who are we talking about?5.3.1. Experts: legitimising knowledge and revitalisation5.3.2. Language advocates: disseminating the revitalization narrative5.3.3. Traditional and new speakers5.4. Conclusion6. What the Occitan Language movement is up against: the French Nationalist and Linguistic Project 6.1. Introduction6.2. Narratives of Frenchness6.3. Erasing linguistic Otherness in the Sixteenth century6.4. Patois and the construction of citizenship6.5. Dialectology and the linguistic making of France6.6. The French nationalist project and the marginalisation of the South6.7. Conclusion: a new world ready for language revivals to happen7. Reviving Occitan 7.1. Introduction7.2. The first ‘Occitan’ revivals?7.3. The contemporary language movement in Southern France: from the Felibrige to the Institut d’Estudis Occitans7.4. The primacy of place, or the identifi cation of language and territory7.5. History: imagining the past and calling the future into being7.6. Conclusion8. Internal struggles 8.1. Introduction: language revitalisation as a terrain for language ideological debates8.2. Nineteenth century linguistic ideological debates: who can speak on behalf of the South?8.2.1. History as a shaping discipline8.2.2. Early orthographic debates8.2.3. Representing the South8.3. Contemporary struggles: Provençal as a language in its own right or as an Occitan dialect8.3.1. Ideological roots of contemporary linguistic arguments8.3.2. Diversity and the endangerment discourse of the 1980s and 1990s: setting the old song to a new tune8.3.3. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet: the collectif prouvènço, a new player in provençal language politics8.3.4. Occitan globalisation and the shaming of the Occitan middle class8.4. ConclusionLegitimacy 9. Legitimate language and traditional speakers 9.1. Introduction: fi nding the ‘traditional speaker’9.2. ‘Language’ according to traditional speakers in provence9.3. Terminological confusion in orange9.3.1. Categorising speech and language: ‘patois’ and ‘mistralien’9.3.2. Language and place9.4. Conclusion10. Children as ambiguous participants in language revitalisation 10.1. Introduction: the dubious child10.2. Children as children: tokens of growth and of a future for the community10.3. Children as pupils10.4. Bilingual education pupils as ‘new speakers’10.4.1. New speakers and legitimate language on the Provençal linguistic market10.4.2. New speakers for academics: a descriptive category?10.4.3. Legitimacy among bilingual school pupils in Provence10.4.4. Encountering the native speaker: reframing language into old vs. new provençal10.5. Conclusion11. Conclusion: wrestling with classifi cations in a world of signs References Index