Saturday, May 23, 2009

Language Maintenance and Shift

Multilingual communities allow people to choose any code or variety in social interactions. These choices may have potential longer-term effects on the languages existing in those communities. The first effect is language shift. It is the process whereby a community gradually abandons its original language shifts to another language. Factors contributing to language shift are economic, social, political, demographic factors as well as attitudes and values (p.54). If this phenomenon continues, the speakers gradually lose the fluency and competence. This is the process of language death. The speakers tend to use less complex grammatical patterns and smaller amount of vocabulary. When the speakers the language die, the language die with them.

In order to save the language from dying, certain communities attempt to maintain the language. The communities continue speaking its original language in most domains. This language maintenance is done through language planning in education, law, government, or media. For languages which are considered dead like Latin or Hebrew, there is also an attempt to revive them through formal instruction.
According to the writer, there is no magic formula for guaranteeing the success of language maintenance or revival or for predicting language shift or death. I agree with this opinion because factors triggering the above phenomena in each multilingual community vary. The pressure from the dominant language speakers will not automatically lead to language shift.

I am very interested in studying these language phenomena. It shows me how people use the language in attempting to adjust with other speech communities. As a multilingual, I personally do not want to experience language shift let alone language loss. I see that being multilingual gives me more opportunities to interact with different speech communities. It helps me widen my horizon.

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