[{"_1":2,"_52":-5,"_53":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4,"_14":15,"_50":-5,"_51":-5},"root",{"_5":-5,"_6":-5,"_7":-5,"_8":9,"_10":11},"user","shoppingCartId","toast","locale","en","constants",{"_12":13},"paypalClientId","AenrHU49peF-ZUH-Yq7AXLLNZYGUGlml474U16NCjB4ZznmQCEjiliN3whyuVZmkb7VxEzmTALgtKEKE","routes/_store+/_readers+/email_author.$slug/route",{"_16":17,"_49":-5},"book",{"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":23,"_24":25,"_26":27,"_28":29},"id","Z2lkOi8vbGVhbnB1Yi9TdG9yZTo6Qm9va1Byb2R1Y3QvNDU1NDI","title","Exploring Language and Human Flourishing","state","published","contactAuthorMethod","email","aboutText","

Human flourishing is a frequent topic in the popular and academic literature, along with the annual surveys and reports that rank the happiest nations on earth. The king of Bhutan famously described the goal for his country as pursuing Gross National Happiness (over and above Gross National Product). Many disciplines have their own matrices by which to study human flourishing each with their own foci: health, feelings of happiness, brain activity when we're happy, economic prosperity, an absence of corruption, meaning and purpose, a clean environment, and religious involvement to name but a few.

Less commonly, and even infrequently, do studies make a connection between language and human flourishing. On the one hand, the relationship is so obvious as to make any point of connection meaningless. Of course, the languages in one's repertoire will have affect on certain aspects of human flourishing. On the other hand, those of us who spend time studying the local languages of the world and the communities that speak them intuit that there is some kind of causal relationship that is worth paying attention to. Ethnolinguistic vitality would seem to correlate, at least on casual observation, with overall community health and vitality. The goal of \"Exploring Language and Human Flourishing,\" then, is to spawn research and understanding of the relationship between the overall well-being of an ethnolinguistic community and its language ecology.

This volume is a small start in that effort. It is a compilation of the papers presented at the online Pike Center Working Symposium on \"Language and Human Flourishing,\" May 17-20, 2021. It is a new endeavor to make a connection between language and human flourishing for each of the authors here. The contributions are \"working papers,\" and as such need further work and refinement through the process of peer review. It is hoped that at some point in the near future, we will be joined by a larger multidisciplinary group in a Pike Center Public Symposium. In the long run, we will consider the volume to have had some measure of success if it spawns a systematic reflection and study of the associated questions and assumptions inherent in the connection between language and human flourishing.

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