Endangered Metaphors

When the last speaker of a language dies, s/he takes to oblivion the memories, associations and the rich imagery this language community has once lived by. The cultural heritage encoded in conventional linguistic metaphors, handed down through generations, will be lost forever. This volume consists of fifteen articles about metaphors in endangered languages, from Peru to Alaska, from India to Ghana.
The empirical data demonstrate that the assumptions of contemporary cognitive linguistic theory about “universal” metaphors and the underlying cognitive processes are still far from plausible, since culture plays an important role in the formation of metaphors. Moreover, that theory has been based on knowledge of metaphors in some standard languages. Indigenous and other minority languages, especially mainly orally used ones, have been disregarded completely.
Besides researchers and students in linguistics, especially in metaphor and figurative language theory, this compilation provides food for thought for scholars in large fields of cultural studies, ranging from anthropology and ethnology to folkloristics and philosophy.

Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and University of California Santa Barbara:
Perhaps the major issue facing linguists today is the phenomenon of language endangerment. [...] Metaphors are a particularly interesting area of language because of their interaction with both language and culture, providing an insight into the ways in which different cultures come to terms with their environments, an insight that will be lost if the metaphorical systems of different languages disappear without being documented. It is therefore with great pleasure that I recommend the present volume to a broad linguistic readership. The editors and contributors have succeeded in bringing together and systematizing a wide range of phenomena involving metaphors in endangered languages [...]. I join them in encouraging others to continue their work by documenting metaphors in endangered languages, always bearing in mind that metaphors may be one of the first parts of a language to disappear once it becomes endangered.