LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND SHIFT

There are many different social reasons for choosing a particular code or varie ty in a multilingual community. What real choice is there for those who speak le sser-used languages in a community where the people in power use a world languag e such as English? How do economic and political factors influence language choi ce? There are various constraints on language choice faced by different communit ies as well as potential longer-term effects of these choices-language shift or language death. There are attempts to reverse these consequences through languag e revival efforts. Language Shift Language shift, referred to as language transfer or language replacement or assi milation, is the progressive process whereby a speech community of a language sh ifts to speaking another language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a given mother tongue who speak another language more often in the home. The data is used to measure the use of a given language in the lifeti me of a person, or most often across generations within a linguistic community(W ikipedia, 2010). The process whereby a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language is cal led assimilation. Language shift can happen in migrant minorities. For example: Manibean is a you ng British Hindu woman who lives in Coventry. Her family moved to Britain from U ganda in 1970, when she was 5 years old. She started work in the shop floor in a bycicle factory when she was 16. At home Maniben speaks Gujerati with his paren t and grandparents. Although she had learned English at school, she found she di d not need much at work. Many of the girls working with her also spoke Gujerati, so when it wasn t too noisy they would talk to each other in their home language. M aniben was good at her job and she got promoted to floor supervisor. In that job she needed to use English more of the time, though she could still use some guj erati with her old wormates. She went to an evening classes and learned to type . Then, because she was interested, she went on to learn how to operate a word-p rocessor. Now she works in the main office and she uses English all time at work . Maniben s pattern of language use at work has gradually shifted over period of yea rs (Holmes, 1992). Language shift is not always the result of migration. Political, economic and so cial changes can occur within a community, and this may result in in linguistic cganges too. In Oberwart, for instance,an Austrian town on the border of hunga ry, the community has been gradually shifting from Hungarian for some time. Befo re the First World War the town of Oberwart (known then by its Hungarian name, F elsoor) was part of Hungary, and most of the town people used Hungarian most of the time. However, because the town had been surrounded by German-speaking villa ges for over 400 many people also knew some German. At the end of the war , Obe rwart became part of Austria, and German became the official language . Hungaria n was banned in schools. This marked the beginning of a period of language shift . Language shift often reflects the influence of political factors and economic fa ctors such as the need for work. People may shift both location and language for this reason. Over the last couple of centuries , mant speakers of Irish, Scott ish, Gaelic and Welsh, for instance, have shifted to England, and consequently to English, primarily to get work. They need English both for their job success and for their socal well-being- to make friends. But we find the outcome is the same when it is the majority group who do the physical moving. For Instance: Tam ati lives in Wanganui, a large New Zealand town . He is 10 years old and he spea ks and understands only English, though he knows a few Maori phrases. None of hi s mates know any Maori either. His grandparents speak Maori, however. Whenever there is a big gathering , such as funeral or an important tribal meeting, his g randfather is one of the best speakers. Tamati s mother and father understand Maori, but they are no fluent speakers. They can manageto speak short simple conversat ion, but that s all about it. Tamati s little sister, Miriama, has just started at a pr

-school where Maori is used, so he thinks maybe he ll a bit from her. When language shift ocurs, it is almost always shift towards the language domina nt powerful group. A dominant group has little incentive to adopt the language o f a minority. The dominant language is associated with status, prestige and soc ial success. It is used in the glamour contexts in the wider society-for formal speeches on ceremonial occasions, by news readers on television and radio, and b y those whom young people admire - pop-stars, fashion models, and disc-jockeys. It is scarcely surprising that many young minority group speakers should see i ts advantages and abonden their own language. Language Death and Loss In linguistics, language death (also language extinction or linguistic extinctio n, and rarely linguicide or glottophagy)is a process that affects speech communi ties where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given l anguage variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and or fluent sp eakers of the variety. Language death may affect any language idiom, including d ialects and languages. Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called langu age loss) which describes the loss of proficiency in a language at the individua l level. An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a languag e dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist. Far from inspiring the world to act, the issue is still on the margins, accordin g to prominent French linguist Claude Hagege. "Most people are not at all interested in the death of languages," he says. "If we are not cautious about the way English is progressing it may eventually kill most other languages." According to Ethnologue, a US organisation owned by Christian group SIL Internat ional that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered. Among the ranks are the two known speakers of Lipan Apache alive in the US, four speakers of Totoro in Colombia and the single Bikya speaker in Cameroon. "It is difficult to provide an accurate count," says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewi s. "But we are at a tipping point. From here on we are going to increasingly see the number of languages going down." What is lost? As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small commu nities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. Th e number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide? "What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressin g the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framew ork of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege. "It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a te stimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses w hat other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to e xpress." For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words . They are living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too. WAR OF WORDS 6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) fol lowed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).

133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people SOURCE: Ethnologue

Cross words The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture? One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argu ed that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers "have c hanged to points of no return". The story of Babel bestowed great power on societies with one language As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists ' sake than for the communities themselves. Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. B ecause of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to thin k of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well. This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost. "There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something," he says. What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own. An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own ch oice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and t hat their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach t hem tribal languages. "We can do nothing when the abandonment of a language corresponds to the will of a population," he says. Babbling away Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Maori in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink. Hebrew was successfully revived from a written to a living language Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th cen tury. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say "I love you" and "pass the salt" - the French linguists' criteria for detecting li fe. But with the "strong will" of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought ba ck into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more . Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language . But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported b y little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem ins urmountable. "You've got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it," says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

"We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because i t is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation." LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE Language maintenance can be defined as the colective decision to contini e using the language or language traditionally used (Fasold, 1985). It is supero rdinate that subsumes within itself such areas as language revival, language re form, language shift, language standardisation, and termilogical modernisation. Language maintenance occurs in two contexts: community language maintenance and dominant language maintenance. When a community language is threatened with exti ncton, there is an obvious need for language maintenance. Its efforts heve been directed at the preservation of large number of indigenouslanguages having limit ed numbers of speakers in North America, South America, Africa, Europe and Austr alia. Language maintenance in this context is a process that normally precedes l anguage revival. In second context, where every language needs to be maintained so as to prevent it from diverging exessively from some mutually agreed upon standard, En glish provides an apt example. It is quite clear that in some countries using E nglish as a national or official language, there is in fact an evident movement of the indigenous varieties away from the norm. This phenomenon may be partially linguistic, but it also can be attributed to the educational system which is li kely to endenger a spiral movement away from the norms, that is, children are ta ught by non-native speaker whose pronunciation and grammar are likely to be nonstandard. Language Revival An anlysis of the process of language revival as a language planning goa l is more complex than it first appears. Paulson et all., (1993) argue the areas should be reconceptualised as language regenesis, comprising three sub-categori es: language revival, language revitalisation, and language reversal. Bentahila and Davies (1993), on the other hand, suggest language revival connsists of effo rts at restoration (backward looking) or transformation (forward looking). Language revival occurs in a situation where a language has either enire ly died off or on the verge of dying off. The reasons for language death are var ied and complex, but in simple term, languages die because the numbers of speake rs diminishes to extinction. There are many examples of languages which are dying or have died. The n umber of Native America or Aboriginal Australian are shriking very rapidly. Dixo n states that every Aboriginal language in australia is currently at risk. Croco mbe estimates that of the 1200 or more languages of the Pacific, only about 12 w ill survive. Unless the linguistic ecology can be change to be more supportive of endangered languages, informe estimates suggest that 90% of all languages wor ldwide could disappear within a couple of generations (Muhlhausser, 1995). Language such as Ainu in Japan or the language of the aboriginal peopl of taiwan, are n the verge or extinction because the linguistic ecology necessar y to support these language no longer exists. Ainu has been replaced across a va riety of register by Japanese, while the language of the aboringinal peopl of Ta iwan is being treatened by Taiwanese and mandarin. There are, however, also illu strations of languages which have been revived through language restoration, lan guage revitalisation (or transformation0 and language reversal. The most dramatic case of language restoration, the bringing back to lif e of a dead language, is undoubtedly that of Hebrew, where a anguage which had b een used only as the ritual language of judaism has become the national languag e of Israel. This symbolic political act upon independence in 1948 has resulted in an enormous effort to turn hebrew into a modern language capable of dealing n ot only with the register of science and technology, but also with the domains o f government and politcs, business and economics and even such areas as auto mec hanics. The effort has required not only substantial infussion of funds and exte nsive linguistic work to modify and extend to the lexicon, morphology and gramma r but has implied the willingness of the people living in the state of israel, a

polyglot population, to accept hebrew as the national language and to use it in the variety of domains in which it is now available. However, not all of these efforts have been sucessful. For example, auto mechanics resisted resisted learn ing the Hebrew lexicon since a perfectly good English and German one was already in wide distributuion, and consequently rejected the carefully devised hebrew t erminology. Language revitalisation refers to the new-found vigour of endangered lan guage still in use. There are a variety of other illustration of languages which have been revitalised or in which revitalisationefforts are under way. Interest ing illustrations involve such languages as Navajo in the United States or maori in New zealand, but there are other examples among the surviving languages of t he Aboriginal people of australia and the native american people in the United S tates. Language reversal implies the turning around the existing trends in lang uage usage, which a focus on the circumstances in which one language in a state begins to be used prominently. Language reversal may have a legal basis, as wit h Catalan, which attained official status in 1984, having previously been techni cally illegal; may be a reversal of shift, as with Maori, which has moved from a decline in use to an increase in use; or may be a rebound of an exaglossic lang uage; as in Singapore and Malaysia where the colonial language English, is once again becoming more important after a period of decline. Language Reform Language reform occurs in situations where a language has sufficient vitality bu t it is not able to deal adequaely with domains and registers that are new to th e culture. Generally, this occurs over a period and involves cahanges in or simp lification of orthography, spelling, lexicon or grammar with the aim of facilita ting language use. While it can be argued that language reform is a process that all languages undergo, rapidly expanding technology has placed the greatest str ain on traditional languages for reform. Perhaps the most quoted example of lang uage reform occured in Turkey in the 1920, when Kemal Atturk successfully change d the writing system to a romanised one, removed many of the Persian influences in the language and borrowed terminology from European languages to make moderni sation possible. The Pin ying writing system for Chinese, the attempt to romanis e Hebrew and the romanisation of Vietnamese are the examples of romanisation for scripts reform. The Turkish example suggests that language reform may take many shapes. While He brew is normally associated with language revival (restoration), it was also the subject spelling reform in the 1960. Malaysia and Indonesia introduced spelling reforms in 1972 to standardise the spelling and aspects of grammar and lexis be tween these dialects of indonesian Malay (Alisjahbana, 1984: omar, 1975: Vikor, 1993).