Friday, September 2, 2011

03. Language Maintenance and Shift

     The Obama fist-bump heard 'round the world.


When a language dies, the cultural knowledge embodied within it also dies. In this sense, a language death represents the death of a world view.

Colorful idioms and idiomatic associations -- with their attendant cultural context and historic association -- die when a language becomes extinct. Idioms provide linguistic connections to many important social elements, including:
  • Historic people, places and events
  • Community values and tradition
  • Cultural artifacts (stories, poems, oaths, jokes)
  • Gesture (fist-bump, high-five)
  • Rhythmic and melodic representations



The various social pressures that affect language use can produce three very different results: language death, language shift and language maintenance.






The most prestigious status for any language is that of official language, because states or countries that grant it automatically commit to using that language in all of their operations. Of the world's 6,000 to 7,000 languages, only about 100 stand as the official languages of one or more countries.




Language shift is largely an issue related to urbanization. Languages associated with the urban milieu become more prestigious and more attractive, than "village" varieties.



 There are many different social reasons for choosing a particular code or variety in a multilingual community. But what choice is there for those who speak lesser-used languages in a community where the people in power use a world language or an official language of that area? How do economic and political factors influence language choices?
-- John Darngawn


 Language Shift in Different Communities


Migrant minorities

The order of domains in which language shift occurs may differ for different individuals and different groups, but gradually over time the language of the wider society displaces the minority language mother tongue. There are many different social factors which can lead a community to shift from using one language for most purposes to using a different language, or from using two distinct codes in different domains, to using different varieties of just one language for their communicative needs. Migrant families provide an obvious example of this process of language shift.

Non-Migrant Communities

Language shift is not always the result of migration. Political, economic and social changes can occur within a community, and this may result in linguistic changes too. In Oberwart, an Austrian town on the border of Hungary, the community has been gradually shifting from Hungarian to German for some time.

Factors

Obtaining work is the most obvious economic reason for learning another language. In English dominated countries, for instance, people learn English in order to get good jobs. This results in bilingualism. Bilingualism is always a necessary precursor of language shift, although, as stable diglossic communities demonstrate, it does not always result in shift.

The second important factor, then, seems to be that the community sees no reason to take active steps to maintain their ethnic language.




Dimensions for analyzing language maintenance and shift



This video is meant to provide a sample of the Navajo language. The weather report was given on February 17, 2009 at 7:30 AM in the morning. The english translation provided is a broad translation, since Navajo is such a detailed language that more is said than is translated into English.




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