Endangerment and Revival
Sociolinguistics: Language, Dialect and Society
Course 1 · Chapter 9 · Endangerment and Revival
Chapters 5 to 8 showed prestige, bilingualism and planning at work. This chapter follows them to a hard conclusion: when a community's languages are ranked, the lower-ranked one can fade out. It then looks at what communities try to do about it.
Language Shift
Wikipedia defines language shift as "the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time". It notes that higher-status languages often spread at the expense of languages seen as lower-status, even by their own speakers.
| Cause | What the page says |
|---|---|
| Prestige | languages seen as more prestigious tend to gain ground; elites can drive shift by linking language to status |
| Mobility | described by Anthony as "a social strategy" tied to "vertical social mobility" and access to power |
| Politics | examples include Russification, Spanish centralization, Taiwan's Mandarin-promotion campaigns and a 40-year Tsarist ban on Lithuanian press |
| Migration, cities | mass immigration to Hong Kong from the 1940s made Cantonese dominant |
Case: Hong Kong. Immigrants with different mother tongues needed a common language and Cantonese became dominant; local dialects rapidly vanished as immigrants became the majority in the 1940s and 1950s. The article states that "Most of Hong Kong's younger generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects." It measures shift "across generations" as the share of a community using the second language at home.
Endangered Languages
The Endangered language article defines one as "at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages". Once no native speakers remain, it is "dead" or "extinct".
How endangerment is judged
- Intergenerational transmission is central: a language is endangered when speakers stop passing it on, with "no new speakers, adults or children".
- UNESCO (2003) lists nine factors, including number of speakers, domains of use, government policy, community attitudes and documentation, and four levels: vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered.
- Krauss classes languages as safe, endangered or moribund, depending on whether children will probably be speaking them in 100 years.
The numbers the page gives
- Roughly 6,000 to 7,000 languages are spoken today.
- Some linguists estimate 50% to 90% will be severely endangered or dead by 2100; Krauss estimated about 60 to 80% are endangered.
- The 20 most common languages are spoken by about half the world's population, but most languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers.
- UNESCO's Atlas categorises 2,473 languages by endangerment level. More than half of the endangered languages are in eight countries.
These are estimates, and the range (50% to 90%) is wide.
Why it happens
The article, citing the Cambridge Handbook, lists physical dangers (war, genocide, natural disasters, famine, disease) and causes that discourage use:
- Economic. Poverty drives migration to cities or abroad, dispersing speakers.
- Political. Education and political life conducted only in the majority language, and in some cases outright repression.
- Cultural. Literature and higher education available only in the dominant language; speakers may come to see their own language as backward.
- Shift. Speakers switch to a prestige or more widely spoken language. The article calls marginalization the most common cause; urbanization and intermarriage are also listed.
What is lost, and a dissenting view
- Losing a language can erode songs, myths, ecological knowledge, social cohesion and political standing; the article links revitalization to better health outcomes. During loss, a language often simplifies.
- Most linguists see loss as an ethical and scientific problem, since future research will see only a fraction of human linguistic diversity. Some, such as Peter Ladefoged and Salikoko Mufwene, view language death as a natural process.
Revitalization
Language revitalization (also revival, or reversing language shift) tries to halt or reverse a language's decline or revive an extinct one. Some distinguish "revival" (resurrecting a language with no native speakers) from "revitalization" (rescuing a declining or moribund one).
What helps
- David Crystal's conditions: raising the language's prestige, increasing speakers' wealth and legitimate power, a strong place in education, writing the language down, and using electronic technology.
- Immersion in childhood. Sarah Thomason notes Hebrew and Māori share a feature: children were raised in fully immersive environments (kibbutzim for Hebrew, language nests for Māori).
- Tsunoda's methods: immersion and neighbourhood approaches work only for weakening languages; master-apprentice works for weakening and moribund languages; technology-based methods work for any state of viability.
- Fishman's eight-stage model runs from adult language apprentices and an integrated speaker population through neighbourhood institutions, literacy, schooling, the workplace, and government and media, to higher education; earlier stages should be consolidated first. (The page does not call it "GIDS", but the Endangered language page mentions Fishman's GIDS of 1991 as an early scale.)
Cases the page reports
| Language | What the page says |
|---|---|
| Hebrew | "the only successful example of language revival": a liturgical language became a spoken lingua franca and Israel's national language |
| Māori | relatively successful, through language nests in New Zealand |
| Hawaiian | added to Duolingo in 2018; some propose "Neo-Hawaiian" as a separate language because of heavy English influence; concerns raised about the accuracy of the Duolingo material |
| Cornish | efforts include translating scriptures, a guild of bards and modern literature (Dolly Pentreath is named as last known native speaker) |
| Irish | Andrew Carnie says state-directed teaching has been ineffective; an urban movement built on Gaelscoileanna (Irish-medium schools), over thirty in Dublin, is growing |
| Scottish Gaelic | speakers concentrated in the Western Isles, with the population centre shifting toward second-language speakers in Glasgow; Neil McRae argues use is becoming tokenistic |
Limits and disputes
- Traditionalists argue heavy borrowing from the majority language produces a new language; Ó Béarra called such Irish "English in Irish drag". Nancy Dorian notes conservative attitudes toward loanwords and grammatical change can hamper revival, while others argue structural compromise may aid survival.
- Kendall King found school-based instruction less effective than language use in the home (the Kichwa case).
- Experts doubt the extent of Sanskrit speech in "Sanskrit villages", and census claims may reflect prestige rather than real speakers.
Try It Yourself
A village's grandparents speak language A, parents speak A and B, and the children use only B at home. Describe this as language shift, say which generation matters most for UNESCO's judgment, and give one cause from the page that could explain it.
📄 View solutionCompare Hebrew's and Irish's revitalization stories as the pages tell them. What does Thomason's point about immersion suggest about why they differ, and which part of that answer is your own inference?
📄 View solutionTwo linguists disagree: one says language death is an ethical and scientific loss, the other (like Ladefoged and Mufwene) that it is natural. State each position from the page, then say which question about evidence the page cannot settle.
📄 View solutionChapter 9 Quick Reference
- Shift: a bilingual community gradually moves to the second language; causes include prestige, mobility, politics, migration
- Endangered: speakers stop passing the language on; UNESCO has four levels, Krauss three
- Estimates of future loss are wide (50% to 90% by 2100)
- Revitalization: prestige, education, writing, technology; immersion in childhood (Hebrew, Māori)
- Views differ on whether language death is a loss to resist or a natural process