Languages,
Dialects, and
Varieties
Wardhaugh
Chapter 2
Sociolinguistics
“to study the relationship between language and society”
(Ferguson 1966)
• possible interactions
between language and
society
– social structure influence
– language influence
society
– mutual influence
– no influence
Small group discussion:
Try to characterize your own
speech – how is it similar and how
is it different than others around
you?
What is the difference between language and
dialect?
Variety is a term used for to replace both terms
- Hudson says “a set of linguistic items with
similar distribution”
Variety is some linguistic shared items which
can uniquely be associated with some social
items
a definition that allows us to say that all of the following are
varieties:
Canadian English,
London English,
the English of football commentaries,
and so on.
According to Hudson, this definition also allows us ‘to treat all
the languages of some multilingual speaker, or community, as a
single variety, since all the linguistic items concerned have a
similar social distribution.’ less even than something traditionally
referred to as a dialect.
A variety can
therefore be something greater than a single language as
well as something less,
Hudson and Ferguson agree in defining variety in terms of a
specific set of ‘linguistic items’ or ‘human speech patterns’
(presumably, sounds, words, grammatical features, etc.) which we
can uniquely associate with some external factor (presumably, a
geographical area or a social group).
Standard English, Cockney,
lower-class New York City speech,
Oxford English, legalese, cocktail
party talk, and so on.
For many people there can be no confusion at all about what
language they speak. For example, they are Chinese, Japanese,
or Korean and they speak Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
respectively. It is as simple as that; language and ethnicity are
virtually synonymous
A Chinese may be surprised to find that another person who appears
to be Chinese does not speak Chinese, and some Japanese have gone
so far as to claim not to be able to understand Caucasians who speak
fluent Japanese. Just as such a strong connection between language
and ethnicity may prove to be invaluable in nation-building, it can
also be fraught with problems when individuals and groups seek to
realize some other
identity
Most speakers can give a name to whatever it is they speak. On
occasion, some of these names may appear to be strange to those
who take a scientific interest in languages, but we should remember
that human naming practices often have a large ‘unscientific’
component to them. Census-takers in India find themselves
confronted with a wide array of language names when they ask
people what language or languages they speak. Names are not only
ascribed by region, which is what we might expect, but sometimes
also by caste, religion, village, and so on. Moreover, they can
change from census to census as the political and social climate of
the country changes.
While people do usually know what language they speak, they
may not always lay claim to be fully qualified speakers of that
language. They may experience difficulty in deciding whether
what they speak should be called a language proper or merely
a dialect of some language. Such indecision is not surprising:
exactly how do you decide what is a language and what is a
dialect of a language?
What are the essential differences between a language and a
dialect?
Haugen (1966a) has pointed out that language and dialect are
ambiguous terms. Ordinary people use these terms quite freely in
speech; for them a dialect is almost certainly no more than a local
non-prestigious (therefore powerless) variety of a real language.
In contrast, scholars often experience considerable difficulty in
deciding whether one term should be used rather than the other
in certain situations.
the confusion
goes back to the Ancient Greeks. distinct local
varieties each variety
having its own literary traditions and uses, e.g.,
Ionic for history,
Doric for choral and lyric works,
and Attic for tragedy.
Later, Athenian Greek, the koiné – or
‘common’ language – became the norm for the
spoken language
The situation is further confused by the distinction the French
make between un dialecte and un patois. The former is a regional
variety of a language that has an associated literary tradition,
whereas the latter is a regional variety that lacks such a literary
tradition. used pejoratively; it is regarded as something less than a
dialect because of its lack of an associated literature.
Dialect is used both for
local varieties of English, e.g., Yorkshire dialect,
and for various types of informal, lower-class, or rural speech.
‘In general usage it therefore remains quite undefined whether such
dialects are part of the “language” or not.
In fact, the dialect is often thought of as standing outside the
language. . . .
As a social norm, then, a dialect is a language that is excluded from
polite society’
It is often equivalent to nonstandard or even substandard,
when such terms are applied to language, and can connote various
degrees of inferiority, with that connotation of inferiority carried
over to those who speak a dialect.
What is the difference between language
and dialect?
There are a lot of situations that show
language versus dialect isn’t clear
Chinese
Norwegian/Swedish
Croatian and Serbian
Hebrew
Arabic
Spanish?
What is the difference between language and dialect?
Need to discuss issues of solidarity and power - How do these
play into the definitions of a variety as a dialect or language?
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”
Power requires some kind of asymmetrical relationship
between entities: one has more of something that is important,
e.g. status, money, influence, etc., than the other or others. A
language has more power than any of its dialects. It is the
powerful dialect but it has become so because of non-linguistic
factors. Standard English and Parisian French are good
examples.
Solidarity, on the other hand, is a feeling of equality that people
have with one another.
They have a common interest around which they will bond.
A feeling of solidarity can lead people to preserve a local
dialect or an endangered language to resist power, or to
insist on independence. It accounts for the persistence of
local dialects, the modernization of Hebrew, and the
separation of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian and Croatian.
Dialect continuum - one definition of dialect is a mutually
intelligible variety of a language. A continuum exists in geography if
you travel from NW France to SE Italy or SW Spain - all related
languages.
Each adjacent village can understand each other
regardless of where the political borders are. BUT Paris, Madrid and
Rome speak varieties that are not mutually intelligible, therefore
separate languages
Dialect at one time indicated a
geographical as well as linguistic
distinction
standardization
Codification of language: grammars, spelling
books, dictionaries, literature. We can
often associate specific items or events with
standardization, e.g., Wycliffe’s and Luther’s
translations of the Bible into English and German,
respectively, Caxton’s establishment of printing in
England, and Dr Johnson’s dictionary of English
published in 1755.
Standardization also requires that a measure of agreement be
achieved about what is in the language and what is not.
Once a language is standardized it becomes possible to teach
it in a deliberate manner. It takes on ideological dimensions –
social, cultural, and sometimes political – beyond the purely
linguistic ones.
Standard English is that variety of English which is usually used in
print, and which is normally taught in schools and to non-native
speakers learning the language.
It is also the variety which is normally spoken by educated people
and used in news broadcasts and other similar situations. The
difference between standard and nonstandard, it should be noted,
has nothing in principle to do with differences between formal and
colloquial language, or with concepts such as ‘bad
language.’ Standard English has colloquial as well as formal
variants, and Standard
English speakers swear as much as others.
What is “Standard English”
• Variety which is:
– In most print sources?
– Taught in schools?
– The version ESL students study?
Madonna vs. Guy Richie
• Sometimes standard or RP accent is valued
• Sometimes dialect is valued
• Elitist impulse vs socialist impulse in
dialectic
Bell’s criteria for the difference between language and
dialect?
Vitality
•
•
•
•
Manx and Cornish dead
Latin too is dead
Dialects also die
But other dialects (and languages) are born
and the classical languages are still vital
parts of Western culture. Hebrew/Irish
Historocity
• Groups link sense of identity with language.
Unifying force? Divisive as well?
• a language of identity - belongs to its
speakers - Germany and German language Chinese
Autonomy
• Speakers of a language of dialect may feel different and
special. - a language is felt to be different by its speakers - Catalan? problems with pidgin and creole langs - Chinese again
Reduction
• Other linguistic groups recognize their dialect as being
substandard, though they may love it nevertheless. In fact,
the fact that it is substandard can be thought of as a badge
of honor. Cockney is a good example as is Glaswegian,
Mancunian. Surfer dialect too. What others? functionally
limited, particularly to less prestigious domains - linguistic insecurity - pidgins
Mixture
Feelings about the purity or lack of purity of a
dialect. People feel that their “mixed” speech is
debased, deficient, degnerate,
Good speakers Bad speakers
Most groups recognize better and worse dialects and
pronunciations, though the heirarchy here is relative
and shifting. Parisien French, Oxford EnglishDE
FACTO NORMS
 With these criteria, different varieties meet them differently
Language vs Dialect
• Whatever else it may or may not be, a
dialect is a subset of a language?
Vernacular and Koine
• Vernacular: the speech passed down from
parent to child as primary mode of
communication (Do parents pass down
language?)
• Koine: speech shared by people of different
vernaculars
Yikes!
• Look at all the discussion questions on pp.
40-43. I think 1, 11, and 17 are worth
talking about. Any others we might discuss?
Dialect vs patois
• Dialect: has a literature
• Patois: purely oral, rural, lower class
Dialect vs Accent
• Dialect: vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation,
etc..
• Accent: pronunciation
• Everybody speaks English with some kind
of accent. Thirdy, La’in, dune, dude?
Discussion questions
• Let’s look at 1-6 on page 46-7, in groups for
15 minutes then general discussion.
Social dialects
• Dialect associate with group identity apart
from geographical identity. Black English,
Jewish English, Surfer Dudian, Academic
English?
Styles, Registers, Beliefs
• Formal vs informal
• Occupation lingo
• Dialect, style, register are largely
independent
High/low vs better/worse
• We often don’t like speakers who speak
with a posh accent, even though/because we
recognize the social superiority or
“correctness” of the speech. In fact, rural
dialects though recognized as “incorrect’
tend to be preferred over city dialects. We
tend to like older, more familiar ways of
speech. Simple over complex. Bush beats
Kerry?
As Wardhaugh points out, despite
what we “know” people tend to
believe and to teach value
judgments about lanaguage and
dialect.
People without university
educations tend to think of their
speech and grammar as inferior.
They believe pundits who tell
them about “proper” grammar
and speech.
Regional Dialects
Regional variation in the way a language is spoken
is likely to provide one of the easiest ways of
observing variety in language. As you travel
throughout a wide geographical area in which a
language is spoken, and particularly if that
language has been spoken in that area for many
hundreds of years, you are almost certain to notice
differences in pronunciation, in the choices and
forms
of words, and in syntax. There may even be very
distinctive local colorings in the language which
you notice as you move from one location to
another. Such distinctive varieties are usually
called regional dialects of the language. As we
saw earlier (p. 28), the term dialect is sometimes
used only if there is a strong tradition of writing in
the local variety.
When a language is recognized as being
spoken in different varieties, the issue
becomes one of deciding how many
varieties and how to classify each variety.
Dialect geography is the term used to
describe attempts made to map the
distributions of various linguistic features
so as to show their geographical
provenance.
For example, in seeking to determine features of the dialects of
English and to show their distributions, dialect geographers try to
find answers to questions such as the following. Is this an rpronouncing area of English, as in words like car and cart, or is it
not? What past tense form of drink do speakers prefer? What names
do people give to particular objects in the environment, e.g., elevator
or lift, petrol or gas, carousel or roundabout? Sometimes maps are
drawn to show actual boundaries around such features, boundaries
called isoglosses, so as to distinguish an area in which a certain
feature is found from areas in which it is absent.
When several such isoglosses coincide,
the result is sometimes called a dialect
boundary. Then we may be tempted to
say that speakers on one side of that
boundary speak one dialect and
speakers on the other side speak a
different dialect.
On the other hand, humans are naturally
very smart about language. We deduce
and intuit a great deal about speakers.
How can do we make these judgments?
How can we know when we are right
and wrong? Would we be able to spot a
Martian trying to pass himself off as a
native English speaker?
As I indicated in chapter 2, it is possible to
refer to a language or a variety of
a language as a code. The term is useful
because it is neutral. Terms like dialect,
language, style, standard language,
pidgin, and creole are inclined to arouse
emotions.
In contrast, the ‘neutral’ term code, taken from
information theory, can be used to refer to any
kind of system that two or more people employ
for communication. (It can actually be used for
a system used by a single person, as when
someone devises a private code to protect
certain secrets.)
Why do people choose to use one code rather
than another?
what brings about shifts from one code to
another ?
and why do they occasionally prefer to
use a code formed from two other codes by
switching back and forth between
the two or even mixing them?
people are nearly always faced with choosing an
appropriate code when they speak. Very young
children may be exceptions, as may learners of a
new language (for a while at least) and the victims
of certain pathological conditions.
In general, however, when you open your mouth,
you must choose a particular language, dialect,
style, register, or variety – that is, a particular
code.
You cannot avoid doing so. Moreover, you
can and will shift, as the need arises, from one
code to another. What are some of the factors
that influence the choices
you make?
Language choice
• code switching
– changing from one language to an other
• situational switching
• metaphorical switching
• code-mixing
– speaking in one language but using pieces from another
• style shifting
– standard English vs. afro-american vernacular
• language borrowing
Diglossia
• Ferguson’s definition (1959): the side-by-side existence of historically &
structurally related language varieties
– the Low variety takes over the outdated High variety
• Fishman’s reformulation (1967): a diglossic situation can occur anywhere
where two language varieties (even unrelated ones) are used in functionally
distinct ways
– the Low variety loses ground to the superposed High variety
– problematic as it creates an opposite situation to widespread bilingualism
Fishman’s reformulation
+ diglossia
- diglossia
+ bilingualism Everyone in a community
knows both H and L, which are
functionally differentiated
An unstable, transitional situation in
which everyone in a community
knows both H and L, but are
shifting to H
- bilingualism
A completely egalitarian speech
community , where there is no
language variation
Speakers of H rule over
speakers of L
Diglossic situation
• Four examples:
Situation
Arabic
Swiss German
Haitian
Greek
'high' variety
Classic Arabic
'low' variety
Various regional
colloquial varieties
Standard German Swiss German
Standard French Haiti Creole
Katharévousa
Dhimotiki
Diglossic situation: functions of H vs. L
Situation
Sermon in church or mosque
Instructions to servants, waiters, worksmen, clerks
Personal letter
Speeches in parliament, political speeches
University lecture
Conversations with family, friends, colleagues
News broadcasts
Radio 'soap opera'
Newspaper editorial, new story, caption on picture
Caption on political cartoon
Poetry
Folk literature
H
L
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Ferguson, Charles. 1972. Diglossia. In: Pier Paolo Giglioli (ed.). Language and Social Context.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 232-251. In: Ralph Fasold. 1985. The Sociolinguistics of Society. Oxford:
Blackwell, 35.
• You do not use an H variety in
circumstances calling for an L variety, e.g.,
for addressing a servant; nor do you usually
use an L variety when an H is called for,
e.g., for writing a ‘serious’ work of
literature. a risky endeavor
• Norman Conquest of 1066, English and
Norman French coexisted in England in a
diglossic situation with Norman French the H
variety and English the L. However, gradually
the L variety assumed more and more
functions associated with the H so that by
Chaucer’s time it had become possible
• to use the L variety for a major literary work.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The H variety is the prestigious, powerful
variety;
H variety is more beautiful, logical, and
expressive than the L variety.
it is deemed appropriate for literary use, for
religious purposes, and so on. There may also
be considerable and widespread resistance
to translating certain books into the L variety,
e.g., the Qur’an into one or other
colloquial varieties of Arabic or the Bible
into Haitian Creole or Demotic Greek.
(We should note that even today many
speakers of English resist the Bible in any
form other than the King James version.)
feeling concerning the natural superiority of
the H variety is likely
to be reinforced by the fact that a
considerable body of literature will be found
to exist in that variety and almost none in the
other.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
the L variety lacks prestige and power.
The folk literature
associated with the L variety will have none
of the same prestige; it may interest
folklorists and it may be transmuted into an H
variety by writers skilled in H,
but it is unlikely to be the stuff of which
literary histories and traditions are
made in its ‘raw’ form.
Another important difference between the H
and L varieties is that all children learn the L
variety. Some may concurrently learn the H
variety, but many do not learn it at all
•
•
The H variety is also likely to be learned in
some kind of formal setting, e.g., in
classrooms or as part of a religious or cultural
Indoctrination.
H variety is ‘taught,’ Teaching requires the
availability of grammars, dictionaries,
standardized texts, and some widely accepted
view about the nature of what is being taught
and how it is most effectively to be taught.
•
•
•
•
whereas the L variety is ‘learned.’
There are usually no comparable grammars,
dictionaries, and standardized texts for the L
variety, and any view of that variety is likely
to be highly pejorative in nature.
The L variety often shows a tendency to
borrow learned words from the H variety,
particularly when speakers try to use the L
variety in more formal ways.The result is a
certain admixture of H vocabulary into the L.
Bilingualism
• Individual bilingualism
– two native languages in the mind
– Fishman: “ a psycholinguistic phenomenon”
• Societal bilingualism
– A society in which two languages are used but where
relatively few individuals are bilingual
– Fishman: “a sociolinguistic phenomenon”
• Stable bilingualism
– persistent bilingualism in a society over several
generations
• Language evolution:
– Language shift
– Diglossia
BENEFITS OF BILINGUALISM
(California Department of Education, Language Policy and Leadership Office)
•Enhanced academic and linguistic competence in two
languages
•Development of skills in collaboration & cooperation
•Appreciation of other cultures and languages
•Cognitive advantages
•Increased job opportunities
•Expanded travel experiences
•Lower high school drop out rates
•Higher interest in attending colleges and universities
BILINGUALISM AND MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS
”The more motivated you are the quicker you learn an
additional language” (evidence from a number of studies)
Gardner & Lamberts (1972):
•Integrative motivation = social motivation
(to integrate in a specific culture  to fit in to a social
group.)
•Instrumental motivation = motivation
for practical reasons (to do well at school get to university)
 Conflicting evidence in later research with regard to the
importance and distinctiveness of the two motivational
factors
Relationships between knowing one’s ancestral
language and affective factors (an U.S. study by
Wharry, 1993)
Subjects: Native American, Vietnamese American, Hispanic
American college students
Those who were bilingual tended to:
-believe that learning their ancestral language was important
-had integrative reasons for that (e.g., heritage, family
relations)
-believe that their parents wanted them to learn the ancestral
language
-had clearcut ethnic identity
Pidgin and Creole
• Ferguson (1966) distinguished between five language types
based on prestige (p) and vitality (v):
– Vernacular
• unstandardized native language of speech community (-p, +v)
– Standard
• native language of a speech community codified in dictionaries and
grammars (+p, +v)
– Classical
• language codified in dictionaries and grammars which is no longer spoken
(+p, -v)
– Pidgin
• hybrid language with lexicon from one language and grammar from another
language (-p, -v)
– Creole
• language acquired by children of speakers of pidgin, or subsequently by
speaker or Creole (-p, ±v)
Pidgin and Creole
1.Pidgin language is nobody's native language; may arise when two
speakers of different languages with no common language try to have a
makeshift conversation. Lexicon usually comes from one language,
structure often from the other. Because of colonialism, slavery etc. the
prestige of Pidgin languages is very low.
2. Creole is a language that was
originally a pidgin but has
become nativized, i.e. a
community of speakers claims it
as their first language. Next used
to designate the language(s) of
people of Caribbean and African
descent in colonial and excolonial countries (Jamaica,
Haiti, Mauritius, Réunion,
Hawaii, Pitcairn, etc.)
Language shift
in different communities
Migrant minorities
• Typically, migrants are virtually monolingual in their mother tongue,
their children become bilingual, but the grandchildren turn
monolingual in the language of the host country.
• At first, migrants use the host’s language in limited domains and
reserve the home domain for their mother tongue, but soon the host
language gradually infiltrates their homes through their children.
• Children encounter the host languages first on TV but are compelled
to using it for survival at school. Then this language turns to be the
code for communicating with their siblings and friends. Most
families eventually shift from using their mother tongue at home to
using the host country’s language.
• There is also pressure from the hosts on migrants to conform, which
results in language shift from their mother tongue to the host
language.
• Language shift may take three to four generations to occur.
Language shift
in different communities
Non-migrant communities
• Language shift does not always result from
migration; it may result from political, economic,
or social changes within the community of
speakers.
Burgenland: A bilingual community for 400 years.
Hungarian was originally associated with farming and
peasants and German with industry. Then a diglossic situation
resulted in Hungarian as the L-variety and German as the Hvariety. Eventually, German became the language for social
and economic progress and the domains for Hungarian
retracted; German is now spoken even at home.
Language shift
in different communities
Non-migrant communities
• It is almost a rule that the more domains in which a
minority language is used, the more likely it will be
maintained.
• Where minority languages have resisted language
shift the longest, there has been at least one exclusive
domain for the minority language.
• Generally, the religious domain is the most resistant
to language shift. Until now, for example, Latin,
Hungarian, and Arabic are used in Latin Roman
Church, Oberwart prayers, and Islamic rites.
Language Death & Shift
• When all the people who speak a language die, the
language dies with them.
• Immigrants shift to the language of the majority in two to
three generations, but that does not constitute the death of
their ethnic language because it continues to be spoken
by the majority in their old country of origin.
• Language death is similar to language shift in being a
gradual process, in which the functions of one language
are taken over in one domain after another by another
language.
• Language death is manifested in a gradual loss of fluency
and competence by its speakers; competence gradually
erodes over time.
UNESCO RED BOOK ON
ENDANGERED LANGUAGES: EUROPE
(i) extinct languages other than ancient ones (e.g. Kemi Sámi,
Dalmatian)
(ii) nearly extinct languages with maximally tens of speakers, all
elderly (e.g., Ume Sámi, Livonian)
(iii) seriously endangered languages with a more substantial number
of speakers but practically without children among them (e.g.,
Ingrian, Breton)
(iv) endangered languages with some children speakers at least in
part of their range but decreasingly so (e.g., Irish Gaelic, Friulian)
(v) potentially endangered languages with a large number of children
speakers but without an official or prestigious status (low Saxon,
Corsican)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/europe_index.html#extinct
Language Death & Shift
Differences between language shift and language death:
• Language Shift: This is a process in which one
language displaces another in the linguistic repertoire
of a community.
• Language Death: This is a process that occurs when a
language is no longer spoken naturally anywhere in the
world.
Factors affecting language shift
1.
Patterns of language use: Socio-economic factors
- determine in which domains the minority language
may be used the more domains a minority language
is used in, the more chances there is to maintain it
2. Demographic factors:
(a) large enough community of speakers
(b) the community is able to isolate itself from the
influences of the majority
(c) there is a high frequency of contact with the
homeland
3. Attitudes to the minority language:
(a) pride and respect of the language
(b) symbol of the ethnic identity
(c) the language has international status
Factors affecting language shift
Economic, Social, and Political Factors
• A community sees an important reason for learning the second
language:
1. Economic: Obtaining well-paying jobs
2. Political: Allegiance to the government
3. Social: Fitting in
• Bilingualism is usually an indicator, a forerunner, of language shift;
although stable diglossic communities demonstrate that bilingualism
does not always result in language shift.
• Language shift is inevitable without active language maintenance.
Thinking that a language is no longer needed or that it is in any
danger of disappearing may result in language loss.
• Rapid shift occurs when speakers are eager to ‘fit in’ or ‘get on’ in
society; young people and job seekers are the fastest to shift
languages.
Factors affecting language shift
Demographic Factors
1. Social integration leads to language shift; social isolation, on the
other hand, may result in resistance to language shift.
– Isolated rural communities of minorities tend to resist
language shift. E.g., Ukrainians in the Canadian farmlands.
– Improved roads, buses, TV, telephone, internet are agents of
language shift.
2. Size of community of speakers tends to influence language
shift. Where there is a large number of speakers of the minority
language, language shift is slowest.
– To maintain a language, there must be people who can use it
with one another; the larger the group, the more social
pressure to speak the ethnic language.
– Shift tends to occur faster in some groups than in others.
Factors affecting language shift
Demographic Factors
3. Intermarriage can accelerate language shift towards the
language of the partner who speaks the language of the
majority, unless multilingualism is the norm in society.
– Mothers tend to influence language change either by
accelerating it towards the language of the majority or
by slowing it down if her native language is that of the
minority.
Factors affecting language shift
Attitudes and Values
1. Language shift tends to be faster among communities where
the ethnic language is not highly valued.
2. It also occurs where the ethnic language is not seen as a
symbol of identity.
– Language is an important component of identity and culture;
maintaining a group’s identity and culture is usually important to it, so
they maintain their ethnic language to maintain their identity.
– Positive attitudes of speakers support efforts to use the ethnic language
in a variety of domains, these attitudes help people resist the pressure
from the majority group to shift to their language.
3. The international status of the ethnic language either
accelerates or slows down language shift e.g. French in
Maine (U.S.A.) and Quebec (Canada).
How Can a Minority Language be Maintained?
There are certain social factors which help resist
wholesale language shift:
1.
The language is a symbol of identity; e.g., the languages of the
Polish and Greeks in Anglo-Saxon countries.
2.
Speakers live near each other and socialize and worship with each
other frequently; e.g., Indians & Pakistanis in Birmingham and the
Chinese in Chinatowns.
3.
There is frequent contact with the homeland through regular visits
and frequent new immigrants.
4.
Discouraging inter-marriages helps maintain the language of the
minority.
5.
Using the minority language in the extended family helps maintain
this ethnic language.
6.
Institutional support through education, law and administration,
religion, and the media is crucial to language maintenance.
Language Revival
• When some communities realize that their ethnic language is in
danger of disappearing, they consciously work to revitalize or bring
to life the language; Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and Maori are cases in
point.
• The success of language revival efforts depends on (a) how far the
language loss has occurred, (b) how determined its speakers are in
reviving it, and (c) whether the economic factor is conducive or not
(encouraging or discouraging).
• Hebrew was effectively dead for 1700 years but got revived and is
now spoken as an everyday native language of communication.
• There is no magic formula for guaranteeing language maintenance;
similar factors apparently result in a stable bilingual situation in some
communities but language shift in others.
• Pressures towards language shift occur more in monolingual
communities than multilingual communities that consider the
existence of more than one language as normal.