language shift essay

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Language shift.

Lenore A. Grenoble Lenore A. Grenoble The University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.347
Published online: 25 March 2021

Language shift occurs when a community of users replaces one language by another, or “shifts” to that other language. Although language shift can and does occur at the level of the individual speaker, it is shift at the level of an entire community that is associated with widespread language replacement and loss. Shift is a particular kind of language loss, and differs from language attrition, which involves the loss of a language over an individual’s lifetime, often the result of aging or of language replacement (as in shift). Both language shift and attrition are in contrast to language maintenance, the continuing use of a language. Language maintenance and revitalization programs are responses to language shift, and are undertaken by communites who perceive that their language is threatened by a decrease in usage and under threat of loss.

Language shift is widespread and can be found with majority- or minority-language populations. It is often associated with immigrant groups who take up the majority language of their new territory, leaving behind the language of their homeland. For minority-language speaker communities, language shift is generally the result of a combination of factors, in particular colonization. A nexus of factors—historical, political, social, and economic—often provides the impetus for a community to ceasing speaking their ancestral language, replacing it with the language of the majority, and usually politically dominant, group. Language shift is thus a social issue, and often coupled with other indicators of social distress.

Language endangerment is the result of language shift, and in fact shift is its most widespread cause.Since the 1960s there has been ever-increasing interest across speaker communities and linguists to work to provide opportunities to learn and use minority languages to offset shift, and to document speakers in communities under the threat of shift.

contact linguistics
linguistic diversity
language endangerment
documentation
revitalization
historical linguistics
heritage languages
ecological linguistics

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Language Shift

Introduction, general theory and background.

Diversity in Itself
Language Spread
Difference of the Modern Era from the Past
Special Effects of Empires
Pre-Historic
Deliberate Replacement
Attempted Reversal
Practical Revitalization
Language Documentation
Aspects of Language Endangerment

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Cognitive Grammar
Edward Sapir
Teaching Pragmatics
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Language Shift by Nicholas Ostler LAST REVIEWED: 30 August 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 29 May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0193

In this article, “language shift” means the process, or the event, in which a population changes from using one language to another. As such, recognition of it depends on being able to see the prior and subsequent language as distinct; and therefore the term excludes language change which can be seen as evolution, the transition from older to newer forms of the same language. (For this latter topic, seek references in “Historical, or Diachronic, Linguistics.”) Language shift is a social phenomenon, whereby one language replaces another in a given (continuing) society. It is due to underlying changes in the composition and aspirations of the society, which goes from speaking the old to the new language. By definition, it is not a structural change caused by the dynamics of the old language as a system. The new language is adopted as a result of contact with another language community, and so it is usually possible to identify the new language as “the same” as, that is, a descendant of, a language spoken somewhere else, even if the new language has some new, perhaps unprecedented, properties on the lips of the population that is adopting it. Language shift results in the spread of the new language that is adopted, and may result in the endangerment or loss of the old language, some or all of whose speakers are changing their allegiance. As a result, some readings on language spread and endangerment are relevant to language shift. Language shift may be an object of conscious policy; but equally it may be a phenomenon which is unplanned, and often unexplained. Consequently, readings in language policy (especially those on status planning) often relate to it. The conditions of imperial relations between societies, and the special links mediated nowadays by technological inventions, often worldwide and at a particularly rapid pace, are thought by some to require special theories.

Language shift is a dynamic phenomenon of social change, and is therefore a topic of sociolinguistics. There is no general theory of its causation that is universally accepted. Ostler 2011 sets it within a general framework of change in language-using populations. Wendel and Heinrich 2012 gives a framework for kinds of shift, as well as a useful bibliography of past seminal works. Thomason and Kaufman 1988 considers the effects on the corpus of a language that may result from shift, among other language-contact phenomena. Mackey 2001 begins the search for universals that apply in the relative propensity and speed of languages to shift. Barreña, et al. 2007 discusses possible criteria that may indicate impending shift. Bonfil Batalla 1996 outlines a theory of cultural control which bids to explain the linguistic transition. Mufwene 2008 places language shift (as well as language competition and globalization) within a more general context of language ecology.

Barreña, A., E. Amorrortu, A. Ortega, B. Uranga, E. Izagirre, and I. Idiazabal. 2007. Does the number of speakers of a language determine its fate? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 186:125–139.

The authors show that the number of speakers cannot be considered the most important criterion in trying to anticipate language survival or death. Instead, natural transmission and intergenerational use are indicated.

Bonfil Batalla, G. 1996. La teoría del control cultural en el estudio de los procesos étnicos. Acta sociológica 18:11–54.

The background to language shift is theorized in terms of a theory of cultural control, whereby a social group becomes alienated and accepting of external institutions.

Mackey, W. F. 2001. The ecology of language shift. In The ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology, and environment . Edited by Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler, 67–74. London and New York: Continuum.

Offers some recent evidence (e.g., in Quebec) for languages more closely related genetically to yield to one another, but different genetic types to act as a buffer on shift.

Mufwene, Salikoko. 2008. Language evolution: Contact, competition and change . London and New York: Continuum.

A general view of the dynamic relation of languages, changing and expanding at one another’s expense among human populations.

Ostler, Nicholas. 2011. Language maintenance, shift and endangerment. In Cambridge handbook of sociolinguistics . Edited by Raj Mesthrie and Walt Wolfram, 315–334. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511997068

There are three major issues addressed: how a new language can come on the scene; how the rising generation can come to learn it; and what determines when the result is language replacement, and when bilingualism.

Thomason, Sarah, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics . Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

The effects of shift (where a whole language has been replaced, with various degrees of imperfect learning of the new language) are principally compared with those of borrowing (where only new lexis, morphology, or constructions are absorbed into the old language).

Wendel, J., and P. Heinrich. 2012. A framework for language endangerment dynamics: The effects of contact and social change on language ecologies and language diversity. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 218:145–166.

This framework distinguishes replacement (which involves elimination of a distinct community) from shift (which involves long-term language change, typically with smaller languages giving place to larger ones).

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[66.249.64.20|185.80.151.41]
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Open access
Published: 22 August 2018

Language shift: analysing language use in multilingual classroom interactions

Harni Kartika-Ningsih ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3658-7558 1 , 2 &
David Rose 3

Functional Linguistics volume 5 , Article number: 9 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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This paper offers a framework and set of tools for analysing the use of language shift in multilingual classroom discourse. The term language shift refers to the use of multiple languages in all types of interactions, including teaching and learning. The analysis was developed in the context of an action research project in Indonesian schools. It includes three components: a framework for mapping teaching approaches in multilingual classrooms; an analysis of pedagogic interactions, showing the structures of language shift within and between speaker roles; and an analysis of the pedagogic functions of language shift, as lessons and teacher/learner interactions unfold. The theoretical foundation for the analysis is the model of language as text-in-context developed in systemic functional linguistics.

Multilingualism in communities and schools

In multilingual communities, switching from one language to another takes place on a daily basis, so members are likely to speak more than one language. In Indonesia, three major language sectors are part of everyday life for many speakers, including the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, regional languages, such as Javanese or Sundanese, and foreign languages, such as English and Arabic (Sneddon, 2003 ; Montolalu & Suryadinata, 2007 ). A Sundanese speaker, for example, who resides in Bandung, a Sundanese speaking area in West Java, speaks Sundanese with their peers. If a peer speaks Indonesian, Bahasa Indonesia can also be a part in the conversation. Additionally, if both of them speak English, that may also be a part of the conversation.

Author Harni Kartika-Ningsih is an example of such multilingualism. As a Javanese heritage speaker who was born and raised in Bandung, Harni learnt to speak both Javanese and Sundanese in family and community settings. From her schooling experience, she learned to speak Indonesian and English. She often uses Javanese and Indonesian with family members. When she talks to school friends who are Sundanese, they are likely to speak in Indonesian and Sundanese at the same time, with a few lexical items of English as well. In general, the more languages that interlocutors share in Indonesia, the more languages will be deployed in the exchange, regardless of their ethnic background. Such free code-switching or mixing of languages occurs in many multilingual societies where languages are in contact.

In multilingual communities, language mixing is also a common practice in more formal institutional settings such as classrooms. In Indonesian classrooms, teachers and students regularly actualize their multilingual repertoire during teaching and learning. However, despite being the norm in everyday life of multilingual communities, and studies showing its benefits and functions in teaching and learning, code-switching in language learning classrooms remains a hotly debated topic worldwide.

Aim and structure of this paper

To help inform this debate, this paper offers a model for analysing the structures and functions of language use in multilingual classrooms. Multilingual interactions in classroom discourse are described here as language shift. Footnote 1 Language shift is the process of meaning making realized in two or more languages. This includes ‘translating’ or bringing equivalence from L1 to L2, as well as ‘code-switching/mixing’, or using two or more languages in spoken discourse.

The analysis in this paper can be applied to empirically describe precisely how and why language shift is used in pedagogic settings. The aim of the analysis is to develop a set of systematic principles towards design of effective bilingual teaching and learning. The language shift analysis model includes three major components. The first component is a framework for identifying types of L2 language teaching approaches along two axes: the degree to which they favour L2 or L1 as the language of instruction, and their focus on language or curriculum content as the primary learning goal. This is a topological framework on which various approaches can be located and compared (following Bernstein, 2000 ; Martin & Rose, 2008 ; Maton, 2013 ). The second is a description of the structuring of language shift in teaching/learning interactions. Pedagogic interactions are analysed in terms of the roles of speakers, and the moves they make in exchanges. This analysis deploys the tools of exchange structure theory (Martin, 1992 ; Martin & Rose 2007 ). We show that language shift may occur from role to role, from move to move, and within moves. The third component is an analysis of the pedagogic functions of such language shift in multilingual classrooms. For example, L1 may be used by teachers to scaffold learning tasks, or to engage students in the learning activity. The use of L1 for such functions may give way to L2 as students’ L2 knowledge and confidence grows. This analysis uses the tools of pedagogic register analysis (Rose, 2014 , 2018a ; Rose & Martin, 2012 ).

Research method

The analysis model was developed in the context of an action research project in Indonesian schools (Kartika-Ningsih, 2016 ). The project was interventionist in nature in that it sought to develop an ideal model of bilingual teaching practices. It used the genre-based literacy methodology known as Reading to Learn (R2L) (Rose, 2018b ; Rose & Martin, 2012 , 2014 ), which was adapted and extended to suit Indonesian multilingual classrooms. The R2L methodology is a system of teaching strategies that guide learners to read and learn from reading, and then use what they have learnt from reading in their writing. However, the aim of this paper is not to describe this pedagogic model, but rather the language shift analysis that was developed from the research.

The research project involved classes from two secondary schools, representing common types of multilingual classrooms in Indonesia. One school was more economically advantaged than the other, but both schools shared similar linguistic backgrounds. Most teachers and students in both schools spoke Bahasa Indonesia as well as Sundanese as the regional language. English as a foreign language was a major subject in the school curriculum, and was thus a familiar language for students and teachers in the area.

The students included boys and girls in Year 8 (13–15 years old). At the time of intervention, English and biology were learned within an integrated literacy program. The curriculum goal for English was to write descriptive reports; the goal for biology was to study endangered species. The intervention program was designed for students to write descriptive reports in English about endangered Indonesian birds.

Briefly, the intervention involved jointly reading descriptive reports in detail, making notes on the board from these texts, and writing new texts on the board from the notes. In the R2L methodology, these activities are known as Detailed Reading, Note-making, and Joint Construction (Rose & Martin, 2012 ). This sequence was repeated three times with each class. In the first two iterations, an L1 (Indonesian) text was read, notes were made in L1 and translated into L2 (English), and an L2 text was written from the notes. In the third iteration, an L2 text was read, and notes and a new text were written in L2. Students then independently researched, made notes and wrote their own texts in L2. Results included significant improvements in all students’ L2 writing (Kartika-Ningsih, 2016 ).

Data were collected in the form of video and audio recordings of classes during the intervention. The analysis focuses on the teaching learning activities and the interactions between teachers and students.

Mapping the focus of multilingual teaching practices

Debate on l1 use in l2 learning.

It has been argued for many years that L2 teaching should take place only in the target language, as using L1 in the classroom is an obstacle for L2 learning (Howatt, 1984 ; Lambert, 1984 ; Yu, 2000 in Cummins, 2014 ). One reason often given is that L1 is a source of interference and hence errors in students’ L2 speech and writing production. Another is that an L2 only classroom may be the only environment where students living in a non-L2 community can be immersed in the target language.

Conversely, the L2 only position has been criticised as oriented to monolingualism and native-speakerism, rather than the reality of multilingual environments (Lin, 2013 ). Studies of code-switching argue for the benefits of L1 use in L2 learning (Canagarajah, 2011 ; Levine, 2011 ; Lin, 2015 ). The term translanguaging has been proposed to distinguish effective code-switching from random practices (Garcia and Wei, 2014 ). There have been a number of studies describing code-switching practices (Creese & Blackledge, 2010 ; Lin, 2015 ). However, these studies have generally not provided pedagogical frameworks or models which can be applied by teachers in multilingual environments. Identifying effective language shift practices remains a challenge.

A particular concern for identifying effective practices is the focus on either language or content discrimination in various L2 teaching programs. Language-focused programs often emphasize knowledge about language, privileging particular ‘language skills’ as building blocks towards L2 competence. Types of language focus commonly found in teaching methods offered for EFL education include grammatical knowledge, L1 to L2 translation, or communication purposes. On the other hand, content-focused approaches may attempt to integrate language with subject discipline knowledge. For example, CLIL programs involve the teaching of subjects such as biology or mathematics in L2 (e.g. Coyle et al., 2010 ; Cenoz et al., 2014 ). However there is ‘no single pedagogy’ for CLIL programs (Coyle et al., 2010 , p.86). While they share a common focus on subject content, there is no standardization of implementation, including the use of L1 and L2 in the classroom.

A framework for mapping multilingual teaching focus

A systematic analysis of the use of L1 and L2 in multilingual classrooms must consider both the extent of L1 and L2 use, and the teaching focus on language or content. For this purpose, we will introduce the terms ‘enveloping’ for teaching practices favouring L2 use, as learners are ‘enveloped’ in the target language, and ‘enfolding’ for practices favouring L1 use, as the target language is ‘enfolded’ in the use of L1 (Kartika-Ningsih, 2016 ). These neutral terms are preferred to value-laden metaphors like ‘immersion’, which invoke quasi-religious inferences such as revelation by baptism, in place of empirical analysis of pedagogic practice.

In Fig. 1 , variations in language use and teaching focus in L2 teaching are mapped as a topology, with two axes. One axis is language use in L2 classrooms. At one pole of this axis, L2 only practice is termed ‘enveloping’. At the other pole, mixed L1 and L2 use are termed ‘enfolding’. The other axis is the teaching focus, on either content or language. At one pole, language is the primary focus of the L2 teaching method. At the other pole, content is the primary focus in subject discipline teaching in L2. This creates four quadrants which allow placement of various teaching approaches, depending on their language use and teaching focus.

Topology of bilingual education programs. The topology of bilingual education programs consists of two intersecting axes. The vertical axis reveals language learning on two poles: language-focused at the top end and content-focused at the bottom end. The horizontal axis represents language use which involves enfolding as a cline with L1 as transitional and enveloping at the other one as L2 only use

The aim of this topology is not to prioritize one teaching method over another, nor to suggest keeping L2 learners in enfolding or enveloping practices. The critical point is to consider how L2 teaching and learning involves L1 and L2 use, and how language and content are taken into account. To this end, it is essential to carefully describe the structures and functions of language shift in pedagogic practices.

The sequence of pedagogic activities in the intervention can be positioned in this framework, as follows. Firstly, the primary curriculum goal was language-focused, for students to write a descriptive report in L2 (English). However, this language focus was embedded in a content-focused curriculum goal, to learn about a scientific field, biological classification and description. These goals were integrated by studying L1 and L2 texts about bird species, and using note-making and joint construction to write L2 texts on this topic. Secondly, the language of instruction varied with the activities. In the early stages of the teaching sequence, enfolding practices predominated, to support students to gain control of the curriculum field enfolded in L1 use. As students’ control of the field and language skills developed, reading and writing in L2 became enveloped in L2 use.

Re-examining multilingual classrooms

Two dimensions of multilingual classrooms need to be considered in analyses. One is multilingualism, where two or more languages may be deployed in interactions. The other is the structuring of teacher/student relations in the institutional setting of the classroom. To this end, the SFL model of text-in-context is drawn on to describe the structuring of teacher/learner interactions, and the functions of language shift in these interactions.

Text-in-context model: Theoretical framework

The systemic functional (SFL) model of language as text-in-context identifies three broad dimensions of social contexts, including the tenor of social relations between interactants, the field of their activities, and the mode of meaning making, as spoken or written language or other modalities (Halliday, 1978 ). These are variables in the contextual stratum of register. They are configured together at the level of genre, that is, a genre is a configuration of variations in field, tenor and mode (Martin, 1992 ; Martin & Rose, 2007 , 2008 ). Field, tenor and mode are realised by distinct metafunctions in language, including ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Language is also stratified in three strata, as discourse semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology/graphology. This model of language in context is set out in Fig. 2 .

The SFL model of language in social context. Language model in genre pedagogy adopts language in social contexts, represented as a layered circle. Context consists of genre, mode, field, and tenor. Genre or text type is positioned on top of the co-tangential circles. Mode, field and tenor are within the top of the co-tangential circles. Language consists of textual, ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. Textual metafunction corresponds to mode, ideational to field and tenor to interpersonal

This model is useful to investigate multilingual interactions in classroom settings, because it allows us to choose certain dimensions to focus on that are relevant for the study. Starting at the top, the genre of classroom lessons is known as a curriculum genre (Christie, 2002 ; Rose & Martin, 2012 ). Curriculum genres configure two registers together. One is a pedagogic register that includes pedagogic activities (field), teacher/learner relations (tenor) and the spoken, written, visual and other modalities they use (mode). Through these pedagogic activities, relations and modalities, teachers and learners exchange knowledge and values which are known as a curriculum register (Rose, 2014 , 2018a ).

Curriculum genres can be contrasted with knowledge genres, which include the written genres of the school, such as stories, chronicles, explanations, reports, procedures, arguments and text responses (Martin & Rose, 2008 ). Knowledge genres configure the fields of curriculum subjects, such as history, science, mathematics, literature. Students learn to read and write these knowledge genres, at the same time as learning the curriculum content, by participating in the curriculum genres of the classroom. While curriculum content is taught explicitly, its knowledge genres are usually left implicit, but can be made explicit (Rose & Martin, 2012 ). For example, in the lessons reported here students learnt to read and write scientific reports at the same time as learning about bird species. Understanding that language realises both genre and register enables explicit language teaching to be embedded in subject teaching.

Structures of pedagogic exchanges

Pedagogic activities and relations are enacted in language by exchanges between teachers and learners. The structures of exchanges, and speakers’ roles in them, are options in the discourse semantic system of negotiation . Speakers take up roles such as giving or demanding goods, services or information, and these roles may initiate an exchange or respond to preceding roles.

An exchange may negotiate either knowledge or action, and speakers may take a primary or secondary role in either. In an action exchange, the role that performs the action is the primary actor (A1), and the role that demands the action is a secondary actor (A2). In a knowledge exchange, the role that that provides the knowledge is the primary knower (K1), and the role that demands the knowledge is a secondary knower (K2).

If an exchange is initiated by a primary A1 or K1 role, it may constitute the whole exchange, simply by performing the action or providing knowledge. For example, teachers commonly present knowledge in single K1 roles that constitute the whole exchange.

An exchange may be initiated by a secondary A2 or K2 role, which demands action or knowledge and is followed by an A1 or K1 role, performing the action or providing the knowledge. Table 1 shows an example. In addition, the secondary knower follows up with thanks, labelled K2 f.

If an exchange is initiated by a primary actor or knower, it may also anticipate an A2 or K2 response. In this case the initiating role is a delayed primary role (dA1 or dK1). For example, dA1 May I leave? - A2 Yes you may - A1 [leaves]. In a very common pattern in curriculum genres, the teacher initiates with a question, a learner responds, and the teacher evaluates the response. Although the learner displays knowledge, the teacher is the primary knower with the authority to evaluate the learner’s knowledge. An example is Table 2 , in which a class is reviewing knowledge about the text type procedure .

This excerpt includes two numbered exchanges, each initiated by the teacher as dK1. In exchange 1, the teacher initiates by leaving the end of her sentence empty (...), which invites learners to supply the missing element. Several students respond by supplying the missing word ‘procedure’, and the teacher affirms by approving and repeating their response. In exchange 2, the teacher extends with a further question, one student responds and the teacher affirms by repeating the response.

Language shift in classroom interactions

Types of language use.

In multilingual classrooms, language shift takes part during learner/teachers interactions. There are four general patterns of language use in such classrooms, including:

L1, L2, and L3.

These four language use options are illustrated here in examples from Indonesian classes, in which students are learning English as a foreign language (EFL), in other words as L2. Table 1 was an example of an L2 only interaction, as it is conducted entirely in English in an Indonesian classroom.

Table 3 exemplifies L1 only dialogue in Indonesian. Each move is translated below in italics. The teacher and students are discussing the word ‘beaker’ and the reason it is named beaker. The Indonesian word for beaker is borrowed from English, along with the English spelling. The teacher initiates by leaving the end of her sentence empty, and two students attempt to supply the missing word. However, this is not the answer the teacher wants, and she provides the word herself (claiming it is called ‘beaker’ because its spout resembles a bird’s beak or paruh in Indonesian.)

Table 4 exemplifies both L1 and L2 used in the same dialogue. This time the teacher and the students are talking about conjunctions that are used in procedure texts. English wordings are included in the Indonesian discussion. The teacher initiates in Indonesian, in which the word class ‘temporal conjunction’ and example ‘first’ are in English. A student responds with another English example ‘then’, and the teacher affirms in Indonesian. English words are underlined.

Table 5 exemplifies language interplay where three languages are involved, Indonesian, English and Sundanese. The teacher initiates by asking the English name for Indonesian pinset ‘tweezers’. One student guesses the English word ‘princess’ from the sounds, another proposes the Sundanese word cocolok ‘skewer’, and the Sundanese word panyapit ‘tongs’. The teacher ignores all these incorrect answers and writes the English word ‘tweezers’ on the board. (The Indonesian word pinset is actually borrowed from Dutch for ‘tweezers’.)

These four examples of different patterns of language use portray typical interactions in multilingual classrooms. In Indonesian classrooms, L1 is used pervasively as it is part of the students’ everyday life, despite teachers’ efforts to use more L2. Teachers often use L2 for the goals of language knowledge, but use L1 to manage classrooms.

Structures of language shift in exchanges

Tables 4 and 5 illustrated language shift, occuring between roles in an exchange, from dK1 to K2 and K1 roles. Language shift can also occur within roles, between and within moves.

Each role in an exchange includes one or more moves, that are realized in grammar by a major or minor clause (Martin, 1992 ; Martin & Rose, 2007 ). Hence the structures of exchanges consist of three ranks: the whole exchange, the roles of speakers, and the moves they make in the exchange. A role consists of one or more moves, an exchange consists of one or more roles, and there may be a series of exchanges in an interaction.

In the structures of exchanges, three types of language shift are possible: between roles, or ‘interrole’; between moves within roles, or ‘intermove’; and within moves, or ‘intramove’. These three types are described as follows.

In interrole language shift, a teacher may use one language in the initiating roles of an exchange and another language in the closing roles, while students may use either language. Table 6 illustrates interrole language shift between teacher and students. In the first two roles, labeled as K1 and dK1, the teacher uses L1 (Bahasa Indonesia) to ask for the Latin name of a bird. A student responds with the Latin name, and the teacher affirms in L2 (English).

Intermove language shift occurs when a teacher uses both L1 and L2 in the initiating and/or closing roles of an exchange. In Table 7 , two examples of intermove shift are shown. In the first role (A1) the teacher directs students’ attention to the text in L2. In the following K1 roles, she refers to the sentence in L1 in one move, then reads in L2 in the next move. (Note that, while reading, she also glosses the L2 words ‘soft’ and ‘tail’ as L1 words). In the following dK1 role, the teacher uses L2. A student then responds in L1 in one move, but then identifies the wording in L2. The teacher then affirms in L2 in two moves.

Intramove language shift is perhaps the most common type of language shift found in both daily life and multilingual classroom settings. In Table 8 , the teacher and students are jointly constructing a new sentence from notes written in L2. In the first K1 move, the teacher uses L1 to refer to the sentence on the board, but then reads it in L2. In the next K1 move, she uses L1 to refer to the next sentence to be written, but names its topic in L2. In the following dK1 move she asks a question in L1, but with an L2 topic, and clarifies in L2 but reads from the notes in L2. A student then responds in L2 and the teacher affirms in L2.

Figure 3 displays the options for language shift in exchanges as a system network. The first choice is between interrole and intrarole (between or within exchange roles). Intrarole then has a further option of intermove and intramove (between or within exchange moves).

Options for language shift in exchanges. Language shift system consists of two options: interrrole and intrarole. Intrarole has a further option: intermove and intramove

The language shift system provides an explicit framework for analysing code-switching in multilingual classroom interactions. It addresses common patterns of language interplay such as translating, or bringing equivalence from L1 to L2 or vice versa, as well as ‘code-switching’ or using two or more languages in the interactions. This analysis offers the possibility of measuring effectiveness of multilingual teaching and learning.

Pedagogic functions of language shift

As language functions in social contexts, identifying the pedagogic functions of language shift involves a step up from the discourse structures of exchanges to the contextual stratum of register. In terms of pedagogic register, language shift may function to scaffold the teaching/learning activity, to enact teacher/learner relations, or to present the sources of meanings. In order to show the functions of language shifts, this section introduces analyses of these three dimensions of pedagogic register. Values in pedagogic register that are applied in the analyses here are set out as tables in the Appendix to this chapter.

Structures of pedagogic activity

Pedagogic activities are structured in hierarchies of lesson stages composed of one or more lesson activities , that are composed of one or more learning cycles at the level of teacher/learner exchanges. Activities at each of these three ranks are centred on a learning task, through which knowledge is construed by learners; macro-tasks at the level of lesson stages, and micro-tasks at the level of learning cycles. Learning tasks are typically focused (specified) and then evaluated by a teacher. In addition, teachers may first prepare learners to succeed with the task, and the knowledge they construe through the task may then be elaborated. These five structural elements are termed Prepare, Focus, Task, Evaluate and Elaborate phases (Martin & Rose, 2007 ; Rose & Martin 2012 ). The orbital structuring of pedagogic activities as nuclear and marginal phases is diagrammed in Fig. 4 .

Nuclear and marginal phases of learning cycles. Learning cycles are orbital with nuclear and marginal phases. The nuclear phase consists of Focus – Task – Evaluate, Task being the core phase of the cycles. The marginal cycles are Prepare and Elaborate

At the rank of learning cycles, each of these phases may be enacted by a single exchange role. At this level, a common task of learners is to respond to teachers. This task is typically focused with a question or command, and then evaluated by affirming or rejecting. The Focus is typically a dK1 role, the Task is K2 and Evaluate is K1. Prepare and elaborate phases are additional exchanges that may be single K1 roles. The mapping of these elements on exchange structures is exemplified in Fig. 5 . This is an exchange series, as the Prepare and Elaborate phases are additional exchanges consisting of a single K1 role. Double slashes indicate boundaries between exchanges in series.

Phases of pedagogic activities enacted by exchange roles. The orbital structures of learning exchange correspond to exchange roles in pedagogic activities. At the nuclear cycles, Focus is realized as dK1, Task as K2 and Evaluate as K1. In marginal cycles, Prepare is realized as K1 and Elaborate as K1

Table 9 illustrates the phases of a learning cycle, along with the matter that each phase is concerned with. The class is reading an L1 (Indonesian) factual text in detail, identifying and discussing wordings in each sentence. In this learning cycle, the students’ task is to identify a wording in the sentence, the Latin name for a bird species, Nisaetus bartelsi . The teacher prepares this task in two K1 moves, using L1. First, she gives the wording she is after, within the statement it’s about names of Nisaetus bartelsi. Then she gives a further clue, one name which is mentioned as the Latin name . The dK1 Focus then asks students to identify this, What’s the Latin name, again in L1. Students identify the wording in the sentence, and the teacher affirms in L2, OK, good , and repeats the answer. A dotted line marks exchanges within this learning cycle.

In this cycle, the functions of L1 use are apparently to prepare and focus the task of identifying wordings in an L1 text. Language shift occurs in the evaluating phase. As evaluation is a feature of pedagogic relations, this analysis is added in Table 10 .

Pedagogic relations: Acts and interacts

Pedagogic relations include the roles of teachers and learners, termed interacts , and the pedagogic acts that they negotiate. For teachers, these roles include presenting knowledge, evaluating learners and directing the activity. Learners may display knowledge and both learners and teachers may solicit acts from each other. Acts include pedagogic behaviours and acts of consciousness, illustrated in Table 11 . Realisations of acts and interacts are underlined in transcripts, where possible.

Table 10 re-analyses the same interaction as Table 9 , in terms of acts and interacts. By starting the first Prepare move with the L1 words So now it’s about, the teacher invites students’ anticipation of what will follow in the text [invite anticipation]. The second L1 move then invites their perception of the text There’s this one name [invite perception] . The L1 Focus question then directs students to display what they perceive [direct display], and students display their perception by saying the wording, Nisaetus bartelsi [display perception]. Footnote 2 The function of the language shift to L2 is to affirm the students’ display [approve display]. While L1 was used in the Prepare and Focus phases to facilitate the acts of anticipating, perceiving and identifying wordings in the L1 text, L2 is used here to amplify the value of affirmation for the students, in the context of a lesson whose goal is L2 learning.

Pedagogic modalities: Sources and sourcing

Inviting anticipation and perception are interpersonal aspects of guiding learning. As the task is to identify wordings in a text, another aspect is to guide learners towards the wordings, by locating them in the text and describing them. These are features of pedagogic modalities. Pedagogic modalities are the sources of meanings in the learning discourse, and the means of sourcing them into the discourse. Sources of meanings include the environment, spoken knowledge of teachers and learners, and records such as written texts, graphic images and video recordings. Each of these source types has a set of options for sourcing them into the discourse. Options for sourcing from recorded texts are illustrated in Table 12 .

In Table 13 the source of meanings is the text that the class is reading in detail. The first Prepare move locates the meanings in the text with the pronoun now it’s about, which refers to the text. The second Prepare move describes the meanings, as the Latin name . The Focus question repeats this What’s the Latin name , and students identify the wording by reading the text.

Sourcing and interacts work together to prepare and focus the task for students. The first Prepare move invites anticipation at the same time as locating the target meaning in the text. The second move both invites perception and describes the meaning. The Focus facilitates the students’ display by repeating the preceding move. These cycle phases are presented in L1 to reduce the students’ semiotic labour, when reading an L1 text.

Functions of language shift in a multilingual literacy lesson

The detailed reading interaction in Table 9 is an excerpt from the early stages of a lesson sequence, which is ultimately aimed at learning to read and write L2 texts. In a later stage of this lesson sequence, the class is guided to write an L2 text from notes on the board that are also written in L2. At this stage, L1 is used more sparingly. Tables 14 and 15 are a longer excerpt from this later lesson stage, comprising a lesson activity. This excerpt illustrates functions of each type of language shift: interrole, intermove and intramove.

The function of this lesson activity is to write a sentence in L2 (English), that describes the female of a bird species, using notes written on the class board in L2. The teacher’s goals are to expose students to multiple options for structuring the L2 sentence, to make it coherent in the contexts of the text and the topic. This is achieved by reading the notes, asking students for ideas, and rephrasing them in various wordings. The students’ tasks are to perceive the notes and text on the board, to propose ideas for the new sentence, and to follow the teacher’s proposals for structuring it.

This activity consists of a task and elaborate phase, comprising three learning cycles each. In the task phase (Table 14 ), the teacher invites students to reason about an L2 sentence using the notes. In the elaborate phase (Table 15 ), she models how to reason about the sentence structure, and finally directs one student to scribe the sentence on the board. In the transcript, L1 is marked in bold to make language shifts clear, and types of language shift are labelled in the matter column.

In cycle 1 of the task phase (Table 14 ), the teacher first directs students’ attention in L1, Listen to this . She then prepares the task in two moves involving intramove language shift. She first uses L1 to invite perception of the preceding sentence The sentence has started with , and reads it in L2. She then uses a mix of L1 and L2 to direct the writing activity The next sentence will explain the female. She focuses the task in L1 and L2 by asking students to perceive the note describing the female bird. Student 1 then proposes a whole L2 sentence, which displays her reasoning about an appropriate L2 sentence structure. The teacher praises her in L2 and repeats the sentence to the class, still using an L1 word, S1 bilang ‘S1 said’.

In cycle 2, the teacher solicits ideas from other students. She uses intermove language shift to focus the task, first in L2, Any other sentences? and repeats the question in L1. Student 2 proposes an L2 sentence, and the teacher praises in L2. Cycle 3 is then entirely in L2. The teacher again asks for other possible sentence structures, Student 3 proposes an incoherent L2 wording, which the teacher rephrases in L2. In terms of evaluation, this rejects S3’s proposal, but it also prepares the task, so that S3 repeats it as an L2 sentence beginning. S3 pauses and other students propose a further wording to complete the sentence, which the teacher praises in L2.

Elaboration phase

In cycle 4 (Table 15 ), the teacher elaborates on the students’ sentence structure proposals in three steps, using intermove and intramove language shift. First, she models a choice between two L2 sentence structures. She invites the choice, using L1 only. She then states the L2 options, but frames the choice in L1 words, ada ‘there’s’ and atau ‘or’ (intramove shift). In the second step, she uses L1 to invite perception of the preceding sentence, then reads it in L2, but frames it in L1, tadi dibilangnya ‘it was mentioned’ (intramove). In the third step, she models reasoning about the appropriate L2 structure to follow this sentence, and uses L1 to frame each step in the reasoning (intramove). Finally she states the L2 sentence.

In cycles 5–6 a student scribes the sentence with the teacher’s guidance. In 5, this task is labelled as propose spelling, as the student makes a spelling error which the teacher rejects by saying the correct L2 pronunciation and pointing at the word in the notes, which prepares the student to correct the spelling. In 6, the teacher focuses on punctuation with an L1 question, reminding the student to write a period, which the teacher affirms by naming it and praising her.

In sum, there are two phases in this activity. In both phases, there is an overall trend from more L1 when preparing and focusing to more L2 as tasks are evaluated and elaborated. Technically speaking, preparing and focusing tend to be enfolded in L1, while evaluating and elaborating tend towards enveloping in L2.

Within each learning cycle, the teacher tends to use L1 in the first moves for directing attention, directing the activity, and asking students to reason, perceive or remember. As the activity is concerned with L2 text, the following moves tend to mix L1 and L2. L1 is used for framing the tasks, for example, for modelling reasoning about L2 sentence structures. On the other hand, the students’ tasks are to propose L2 wordings, and the teacher consistently affirms them in L2. Thus the overall trend in each phase is from L1 only in teacher’s initial moves, to intramove language shift within following moves, to L2 only in students’ tasks and teacher’s affirmation.

This paper has offered a brief illustration of language shift analysis in multilingual pedagogic practice. Language shift was defined as the process of meaning making realized in two or more languages, incorporating popular concepts such as ‘code-switching’ and ‘translanguaging’.

The analysis included three components. The first was a topology of multilingual teaching approaches, to map the curriculum focus on language or content, and the pedagogic use of L1 or L2, using the terms ‘enfolding’ in L1 and ‘enveloping’ in L2. The second was an exchange structure analysis of pedagogic interactions, to show the structures of language shift beween speaker roles (interrole), between moves within each role (intermove), and within moves (intramove). The third was an analysis of the pedagogic functions of language shift, at the contextual level of register. It was found that language shift varied with phases in learning cycles, and with sequences of learning cycles and lesson stages. L2 learning tended to be enfolded in L1 use at the start of sequences, and increasingly enveloped in L2 use towards the end of sequences. Within learning cycles, teachers tended to use language shift of each type in preparing L2 learning tasks, and in elaborating meanings, while students tended to respond in L2, and teachers evaluated responses in L2.

We should emphasise that this is a preliminary study, designed to develop the language shift analysis tools and test their application. In this case, the tools were developed and applied to analysing patterns of language shift in a designed intervention in an action research project. This intervention was deliberately designed as a scaffolded language development sequence, from reading and writing in L1 to reading and writing in L2. Furthermore, within the first two iterations of this teaching sequence, reading texts and writing notes in L1 provided a foundation for writing notes and texts in L2. Hence, L2 development was deliberately enfolded in L1 use in early stages, and enveloped in L2 use in later stages. The language shift analysis tools developed in this context need to be tested, refined and extended in a variety of other multilingual classroom settings.

In our view, the aim of further developing and applying the language shift analysis is to identify and design language teaching practices that are effective for all learners. A benefit of this approach is that decisions about language use in multilingual classrooms can be based on empirical evidence of efficacy, rather than ideological commitments to one practice or another. The action research project here used language shift carefully to scaffold students’ L2 language development, with significant results. These improvements were achieved, not by favouring L1 or L2 use, or focusing on either language or content. Rather it embedded language development in curriculum content, and enfolded in L1 or enveloped in L2 where appropriate. The trend at each rank of lesson stage, lesson activity and learning cycle is from enfolding in L1, to intramove language shift, to enveloping in L2 as students’ skills and confidence grows. As multilingualism grows across the globe, we hope that the tools developed here will help researchers design increasingly effective and inclusive language pedagogy practices.

The term language shift here is to refer to the system of code-switching, not to be confused with the same term used in sociolinguistics.

The term [display] is used, as learners display for teacher evaluation.

Abbreviations

Primary actor

Primary actor follow-up

Secondary actor

Secondary actor follow-up

Delayed primary actor

Delayed primary knower

Primary knower

Primary knower follow up

Secondary knower follow up

Secondary knower

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Pedagogic Register Analysis

Tables 16-20 set out the values in pedagogic activities, modalities and relations that are applied in analyses above. See Rose ( 2018a ) for further discussion.

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Kartika-Ningsih, H., Rose, D. Language shift: analysing language use in multilingual classroom interactions. Functional Linguist. 5 , 9 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554-018-0061-0

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Language Crisis in the Ryukyus

Mark Anderson

This book chapter is a diachronic study of the process of language shift in Okinawa. I demonstrate how a language shift profile in the form of a timeline can be constructed retrospectively using qualitative synchronic data. These data comprise field recordings of natural conversation between Okinawans of different age cohorts in combination with parameters such as child-bearing age, life expectancy and the age at which people enter the workforce. As shown throughout the discussion, the results can then be triangulated with other researchers’ accounts of the historical context of each phase of shift. The timeline drawn in this chapter illustrates how new subgroups of people with different linguistic behaviours have emerged in the Naha/Shuri community as language shift has progressed. It therefore enables us not only to see how language use has changed over the years, but also to make predictions as to the future course of shift, i.e. when the Okinawan language (Uchinaaguchi) is likely to reach various stages of decay, and finally, extinction. This method of visually representing language shift will be useful not only for scholars interested in the Ryukyuan situation but also for those involved in the study of other endangered languages. APA citation: Anderson, Mark (2014). Language shift and language loss. In Mark Anderson and Patrick Heinrich (Eds.), Language Crisis in the Ryukyus (pp. 103-139). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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10 Language Shift and Sustainability: Critical Discourses and Beyond

Mel M. Engman (MA, University of Wisconsin) is a PhD candidate in Second Language Education at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses on applied linguistics and second language acquisition. She has published and presented work on intersections of identity and heritage language learning, language maintenance and reclamation, and critical approaches to language policy across a variety of schooling contexts. Her current research examines language use and cultural practices in English-dominant Indigenous schools; and she is involved in community-based projects that develop instructional materials for K–12 Ojibwe indigenous language education programs.

Kendall A. King (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Second Language Education at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and researches in the areas of sociolinguistics and language policy, with an emphasis on heritage language students. Recent publications appear in the Modern Language Journal, Applied Linguistics, and the Journal of Language, Identity and Education. She has written widely on indigenous language revitalization, bilingual child development, and the language policies that shape immigrant and transnational student experiences in the United States, Ecuador, and Sweden. Her current research, based in Minneapolis, examines the educational policy and practices that (under)serve adolescents with limited or interrupted formal schooling experiences.

Published: 05 December 2016
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This chapter reviews research on language shift and efforts to sustain and cultivate linguistic diversity, highlighting historical trends and current debates, and in doing so, makes three broad arguments. First, the academic treatment of societal-level language shift reflects the major theoretical, epistemological, and paradigmatic shifts of the last five decades. A review of “historical perspectives” on language shift shows how the guiding questions and methodologies of the field have shifted significantly over time. Second, a review and analysis of work to date illustrates how these trends are equally apparent across language contact contexts and populations. These contexts and populations have much in common—with research in each area addressing issues of (a) purism and standardization; (b) authenticity and essentialism; and (c) heteroglossia and personal identity. And third, while many central, pressing questions remain unanswered, there are new signs of progress.

Introduction

Why are some languages lost and others sustained? What does it mean for a community to “lose” its language(s)? How, when, and why might a language be reclaimed, sustained, and revitalized? Social scientists—including anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and to a lesser extent, political scientists and economists—have been concerned with societal-level language shift for roughly fifty years. Long-standing goals within this domain of research include identifying why some languages are maintained while others disappear; understanding the interactional, ideological, and political processes and pressures that result in these varied outcomes; and documenting their impact, including the academic, emotional, cultural, and economic repercussions for both individuals and communities.

In broad terms, research into societal-level language change includes analysis of the contexts, processes, and mechanisms of (a) language maintenance and sustainability; (b) language loss and endangerment; and (c) language revitalization, revival, and renewal. These three language contact processes are relevant to all minority (or minoritized; see King and Haboud, 2002 ) communities, including Indigenous or First Nations people (e.g., Ojibwe speakers in the US); immigrant, refugee, or mobile populations (e.g., Russians in Israel); and regional or national minority groups (e.g., Finnish speakers in Sweden). In other words, language maintenance, loss, and revitalization can be identified, and have been studied, across all three of these population types (see Table 10.1 for schematic overview and examples).

Of course, there is rarely, if ever, a bright line of distinction across these processes (language maintenance, loss, and revitalization) or populations (Indigenous, immigrant, and minority). And indeed, the attempt to create such a typology is rooted in assumptions inherent in modernist, positivist social science approaches outlined in this chapter. While these population distinctions are often recognized and even promoted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as those of the United Nations (e.g., UNESCO) and the European Union, and by nation-states (sometimes to prioritize claims around language rights), many groups potentially fall into more than one category. For instance, Roma people are treated within the European Union as migrants, but are viewed as a national minority in others (e.g., Roma is a recognized minority language in Sweden). Concomitantly, while language maintenance, loss, and revitalization are often discussed as separate processes, and occasionally as distinct fields of study, in reality, in many contexts, all three processes happen simultaneously (see Fishman, 2001 ). For instance, Ojibwe, within the US state of Minnesota, is concomitantly experiencing both language revitalization, as several immersion schools have been established in the last two years in urban areas, and language loss, as Elder speakers dwindle in number in rural areas of the state. Thus, Table 10.1 highlights how these populations and processes typically have been categorized, though it does not account for the obvious overlaps and oversimplifications involved in such categorization.

The present chapter reviews research on language shift and efforts to sustain and cultivate linguistic diversity, highlighting both historical trends and current debates, and in doing so, makes three broad arguments. First, we demonstrate how the present academic treatment of societal-level language shift reflects major epistemological and paradigmatic shifts of the last five decades. As evident in our review of “historical perspectives” on language shift, the guiding questions of the field (and how researchers have attempted to answer those questions) have shifted significantly over time. Second, our review and analysis of work to date illustrate how key thematic trends are evident across language contact contexts and populations. As will be clear in our discussion of “core issues,” these contexts and populations have much in common—with research in each area addressing issues of (a) purism and standardization; (b) authenticity and essentialism; and (c) heteroglossia and personal identity. And third, as highlighted in our discussion of “emerging work,” we suggest that while many central, pressing questions remain unanswered, there are new signs of progress as ecological and situational approaches to mulitilingualism theorize minority language users, language repertoires, and language indexicalities in new ways to better account for rapidly changing technologies, migration patterns, and meaning-making modalities.

Historical Perspectives

The study of language maintenance and shift (and arriving later to the party, language revitalization) has evolved markedly over the last five decades. The nature of the research questions and the methodological approaches to answering them reflect broader shifts across the social sciences, including the move from modernist to critical stances and beyond. These major trends are outlined in the following sections.

Modernist Approaches

In broad terms, modernist, positivist approaches to social science are characterized by adoption of “hard” science methodologies (e.g., statistical analysis of survey data) and research stances (e.g., that it is optimal and possible for researchers to be neutral and objective). Modernist work is also driven by a belief that research findings can productively and directly inform “rational,” choice-based decision-making, and can result in better outcomes for communities or countries. Early work in the area of language maintenance and shift was deeply rooted in this tradition, and, for instance, was characterized by assumptions that predictive models of shift were feasible; that solutions to language shift and maintenance were knowable and definable; and that such work could be directly applied to solving language problems. For linguists, sociolinguists, and anthropologists of that period, who by and large were Western-trained, this work was deeply enmeshed with the study of newly independent former colonial nations of Africa, South America, and Asia. For the freshly coined fields of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, and their scholarly founders (e.g., Joshua Fishman, Joan Rubin, Jyotirindra Das Gupta, and Charles Ferguson, among others), these contexts provided a wide range of intriguing fieldwork locations for collecting empirical data and for cross-context comparison and theorizing ( Fishman, 1968 ).

This foundational work, which began in the 1950s and fully coalesced in the 1960s and 1970s, was deeply concerned with describing and understanding processes of language shift and language maintenance, typically across varied national contexts. This work was linked, and indeed, foundational to the field of language planning and policy (e.g., Fishman, 1969 ), which likewise in this period sought to inform language policy formation and implementation in newly independent countries. This early sociolinguistic research and theory attempted to establish and utilize universal constructs (e.g., diglossia) and typologies, both to allow for cross-national comparisons, such as the major projects funded by the Ford Foundation (e.g., Rubin and Jernudd, 1971 ; Rubin et al., 1977 ), and to promote scientific, “objective” analysis.

Perhaps the best-known construct from this time period is Fishman’s (1967) extension of Ferguson’s (1959) notion of diglossia, which, in its original formulation, described the distinctions between so-called “high” (H) and “low” (L) language dialects. According to Ferguson (1959) , while H is typically used in formal speaking purposes and for writing and is seen as linguistically purer and more correct, yet is no one’s first language, L is used for everyday communication and is acquired at home, not through formal schooling. As illustrative examples of diglossia, Ferguson (1959) pointed to Arabic (Classical Arabic vs. varied colloquial forms found in different nations), Modern Greek ( Katharévusa , the H, vs. Dhimotik , the L), Swiss German (Standard German vs. Swiss German), and Haitian Creole (standard French vs. Haitian creole). Ferguson developed a typology to differentiate H and L based on criteria such as function, prestige, literary heritage, acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon, and the phonology of H and L.

Fishman (1967) extended the notion of diglossia to include “genetically unrelated” or historically distinct languages (e.g., Spanish and English in New York City, or Navajo and English in the state of Arizona). Furthermore, Fishman argued that bilingualism (an individual trait) could exist with or without diglossia (a societal one) (see Table 10.2 ).

With this reformulation, diglossia became central to the study of language shift and maintenance, as it was conceptualized as a means of compartmentalizing and protecting domains of minority language use. As Fishman (1967 : 36) famously stated, “[b]ilingualism without diglossia tends to be transitional. […] Without separate though complementary norms and values to establish and maintain functional separatism of the speech varieties, that language or variety which is fortunate enough to be associated with the predominant drift of social forces tends to displace the other(s).” Thus, for Fishman, and for many subsequent researchers, the maintenance of diglossia, and the separation of domains (a construct abstracted from topics of communication, relationships among communicators, and places of communication; Fishman, 1967 ) became central to the study of language maintenance and shift. Although questioned and problematized in subsequent decades (see the following section, “Critical Approaches”), this construct provided productive frameworks for a generation of scholarship (e.g., Rubin, 1968 ; see Zentella, 1997 , for limitations).

Critical Approaches

Beginning in the late 1970s, and with greater intensity in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars increasingly pointed to the ways in which language shift and maintenance were inextricably linked to social and economic inequality. Wolfson and Manes (1985 : ix), for instance, in their edited volume, Language of Inequality , drew attention to the mechanisms through which language “reflects and indeed influences social, economic, and political inequality.” During this period, researchers of language maintenance and shift began to focus less on developing universal constructs or typologies, and to place greater attention on analyzing hegemonic ideologies, policies, and practices. Of central concern was unmasking how these policies impacted language use, and language loss in particular, and exacerbated social inequalities more generally ( Tollefson, 1991 ).

This period also saw advances in identifying the linguistic characteristics of languages undergoing shift. For instance, Nancy Dorian, in her landmark study of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic, documented not only the particular social forces leading to language death (e.g., social stigma, changing occupational opportunities), but how these processes were experienced by individuals of different ages and generations, and were evident in their levels and types of competencies in this East Sutherland variety (1981).

Phillipson’s book Linguistic Imperialism (1992) and ensuing critiques (e.g., Bisong, 1995 ; Davies, 1996 ) illustrate this shift in critical attention to processes of cultural and linguistic domination. “Linguistic imperialism” refers to the cultural and structural inequalities that result from the domination asserted and reproduced by languages of power (e.g., English in postcolonial Africa). The construct was not without its detractors—an important critique being that linguistic imperialism fails to ascribe any agency in language choice to the people in “periphery” communities ( Bisong, 1995 ), and instead imposes misplaced colonial guilt on English language teachers ( Rajagopalan, 1999 ). Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) and Language Citizenship (LC) are examples of additional frameworks that come from critical approaches, and are often invoked as advocacy movements linking language to identity and self-determination, a fundamental human right ( Skutnabb-Kangas, 2006 ).

With the greater emphasis on power and inequality, scholars also began to question the neutrality and validity of foundational concepts within the field, such as “diglossia,” “native speaker,” “mother tongue,” and even what constitutes a “language” ( Davies, 1991 ; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007 ). Returning to “diglossia” as an illustrative example, scholars have largely moved away altogether from the term (e.g., “diglossia” is omitted from a recently released textbook, Introducing Multilingualism , by Weber and Horner [2012] , which instead emphasizes “flexible multilingualism,” “language and identities,” and “discourse models of language”). Diglossia has been critiqued as overly broad and imprecisely applied ( Hudson, 2002 ), while others have questioned the accuracy of its foundational analyses (e.g., Puerto Rican English was maintained without compartmentalization in New York City, according to Pedraza et al., 1980 ). Perhaps more important, poststructural scholars have argued that the presentation of diglossia as natural and consensual obfuscates the inequalities on which it is built (e.g., Williams, 1992 ; see also Jaspers, Chapter 9 of this volume).

In broad terms, poststructuralist scholars of language shift and maintenance tended to reject notions of continual progress (e.g., that newly independent states were on a linear trajectory toward “development” as defined by the West). These scholars also questioned whether language maintenance or shift could be meaningfully quantified, measured, modeled, or optimized, and pointed to ways in which social science and “development” projects not only failed to improve conditions on this ground, but often were biased, ideologically compromised, and supportive of the in-place power structure. Concomitantly, researchers increasingly recognized the myth of their own neutrality in the communities in which they worked; for some, this meant explicitly taking on responsibility to attend to, and attempt to ameliorate, the sociolinguistic inequalities evident in their contexts of work.

Language Panic and Language Revitalization

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, some researchers had abandoned their “neutral observer” stance altogether to issue a “call to arms,” arguing that many of the world’s languages were endangered, and in drastic need of attention, support, and resources (e.g., Hale et al., 1992 ). Krauss, in the same issue of the journal Language (1992), famously estimated that, without immediate intervention, 90 percent of the world’s languages would disappear by the end of the twenty-first century. This was a pivotal moment in the study of language loss, and subsequent years saw much greater attention to language endangerment and sustainability across public media (e.g., Diamond, 1993 ), from NGOs such as the Endangered Languages Fund and UNESCO, and in the work of academics (e.g., Hill, 2002 ; Hinton and Hale, 2001 ; Romaine, 2007 ; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003 ).

One result of this was greater attention to language revitalization, both in terms of the development of on-the-ground projects and programs to encourage the transmission and instruction of endangered languages, particularly of Indigenous languages around the world (e.g., Māori, Hawaiian, and Navajo), but also to study those efforts. For instance, King (2001) analyzed the processes and prospects of Quichua language revitalization in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, describing the ways in which these efforts resulted in new forms of the language being used for new functions. In short, rather than “bringing the language back,” King found that revitalization resulted in “bringing the language forward” for use in new ways and by new speakers, and in doing so, often exacerbated existing lines of cleavage, that is, political, social, economic, or cultural divides, within communities.

While some researchers focused on close descriptions of language revitalization programs and processes, this period also saw the development of multiple (“modernist”) frameworks and typologies to assess language vitality. These include scales such as UNESCO’s degrees of endangerment, which range from “safe” (grade 5), “unsafe” (4), “definitively endangered” (3), “severely endangered” (2), “critically endangered” (1), to “extinct” (0) ( UNESCO, 2014 ). Perhaps the most well-known of these frameworks is Fishman’s (1990) “Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale” (GIDS) for reversing language shift (RLS), which offers a means to assess the degree of language endangerment and provides guidance with respect to planning language revitalization efforts. Above all, this framework stresses the critical need to (re)establish stable diglossia through (re)institution of intergenerational transmission of the language. As noted later in the chapter, while the GIDS has been highly influential, it is also the target of substantial critique and debate (some of which was invited by Fishman himself [ 2001 ]).

Poststructuralist Critiques

While one strand of work sought to analyze the effectiveness and impact of efforts to reverse language shift and to provide support for language revitalization efforts, around the same time, another body of work adopted a more removed, even skeptical posture, asking not how best to do language revitalization, but rather, why are language endangerment and sustainability discourses so prevalent, and why at this particular moment? These researchers question the so-called “discourses of endangerment,” which, in their analyses, link linguistic diversity to biodiversity, construct linguistic diversity as part of the world’s collective cultural heritage, and assume that speakers have the right to protect their languages against more powerful ones ( Duchêne and Heller, 2007 ). This poststructuralist approach analyzes how language endangerment is described, legitimized, and by whom; or put slightly differently, “in whose interest is it to mobilize resources around the defense of languages, and why?” ( Duchêne and Heller, 2007 : 6). This work tends to point to the fact that language revitalization movements “have their own specific histories and political contexts”; these might consist of “a broad popular movement serving the causes of equality and justice; they might also be motivated by exclusionary ethnic nationalism, or strategically appropriated by local vested interests in a bid to consolidate their own position,” all of which are often obscured by the tropes of endangerment discourses ( Cameron, 2007 : 284). Other researchers have questioned the premises inherent in counting languages and numbers of speakers, suggesting that the practice rests on profoundly problematic assumptions about the nature of language, the speaker, and the domain ( Moore et al., 2010 ).

Other critical scholars take issue with what they see as the problematic, implicit assumptions built into many scales or frameworks of language endangerment. Romaine (2006) , for instance, argues that Fishman’s term, “RLS,” suggests the undoing or reversing of the past, when it is obvious that none of us (including endangered language communities) can go back in time. Further, the framework’s use of terms such as “traditional” versus “modern” inevitably problematizes “modernity,” and invokes discourses of authenticity, which frequently become unproductive sites of struggle in language revitalization efforts ( Hornberger and King, 1998 ) (more on this in the “Core Issues and Current Debates” section of this chapter). Moreover, Romaine (2006) takes issue with the ordering of the RLS stages, which stresses the need for language revitalization efforts to reinstate home-based intergenerational transmission of the language prior to moving up to “higher” prestige domains of use, such as mass media and higher education, equating failure to reinstate intergenerational transmission with failure to reverse language shift. As Romaine and others note, this is problematic in at least two respects. First, there are many examples of groups who have made great strides in revitalizing their languages by relying on formal educational institutions to teach language despite its minimal presence in the learners’ homes. For instance, languages such as Basque and Irish have gained substantial ground in recent years, largely through their instruction and promotion in formal education rather than in the home ( Gorter et al., 2014 ; Ó Riagain, 2001 ). And second, as Romaine eloquently argues, “in putting the onus on restoration of intergenerational transmission at home as the sole criterion of success, we run the risk of dismissing the value of the journey, which is at least as, if not more, important than the endpoint, as long as each step is regarded as valuable to the community concerned” (2006: 465).

Critical Responses to Critical Situations

Native scholars have played increasingly important roles in these academic debates, as well as providing leadership in the development and evaluation of efforts to stem language loss. And many have expressed anger and resentment that their language is classified as endangered or near extinction ( Hill, 2002 : Leonard, 2008 ), and have been active in attempting to reformulate these discourses. Jessie Little Doe Fermino, for instance, a Mashpee Wampanoag whose language has not been spoken for hundreds of years, suggests that language is inalienable: “No matter what other language abides within us, we still carry the language of our creation within ourselves. To say that a part of our very being is dead is to say that we ourselves are dead” ([2001] quoted in Romaine, 2006 : 468). Leonard (2008) , a speaker of Miami, in response to these discourses of endangerment, proposed the term “sleeping languages” to refer to languages that are not currently known, but are linguistically documented, claimed as part of one’s heritage, and thus might be used again in the future.

Other scholars have questioned the assumptions embedded in models such as Fishman’s RLS. As Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (1998 : 97), suggest, “it is unrealistic to expect the Native languages of Southeast Alaska to recover fully and thrive as they did sixty to a hundred years ago. But they can continue to be used in many ways, both oral and written, that are of enduring spiritual value to the individual and the community, even if these new uses are far more limited and restricted than they would have been in the past.” To set intergenerational transmission as the bar for “successful” language revitalization thus dooms the vast majority of efforts to failure. Other Native scholars such as Sheilah Nicholas (2011) have documented the ways in which Hopi “language is a cultural practice,” for English-dominant Hopi youth.

More broadly and pragmatically, many scholars argue that endangered and heritage languages merit our attention, expertise, and activism simply because language revitalization is an important goal for many groups. While the study of language shift over the last few decades has delivered fewer “universals” than the field’s founders likely hoped, ample research suggests that awareness of language endangerment only becomes widespread when language loss has progressed to a point at which action is urgent in the community (e.g., King, 2001 ). In other words, very often language maintenance is assumed and taken for granted ( Hornberger, 1988 ). It is only when numbers of speakers have dwindled and intergenerational transmission has ceased that communities devote significant resources to language revitalization efforts. The simplest answer to the “why now” question raised by Heller and her colleagues (2007) , then, is that for thousands of languages around the world, that point in time has arrived, and for hundreds of endangered language communities, revitalization is a critical objective.

Researchers of sociolinguistics and language shift, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, face intense competition for their time and attention, as there are few, if any, contexts of work that do not involve heritage, Indigenous, or minority languages and their speakers in zones of intensive language contact. Many researchers have chosen to use their expertise to collaboratively provide technical or curricular support to initiatives under the leadership of Indigenous communities (e.g., Hinton, 2001 ; McCarty, 2002 ) and simultaneously to document and analyze the processes of language shift and revitalization. Others have placed greater emphasis on abstracted analysis of these efforts and theoretical consideration of how these movements intersect with other phenomena such as globalization (e.g., Blommaert, 2010 ; Duchêne and Heller, 2007 ) and language rights movements ( May, 2012 ). As evident in the next section, in contrast to early scholarship in the field, which focused on country-level overviews and universal constructs and frameworks, all of this work has given more attention to examining site-specific interactional processes and discourse patterns, and their attendant ideologies.

Core Issues and Current Debates

Putting aside claims of neutrality and universality, current scholarship attempts to analyze and trouble the unevenness (i.e., the politics and power differentials associated with different languages and their speakers) in linguistic and cultural exchanges at sites of language contact around the physical and digital world. Research on language shift links this unevenness between majority and minority languages to political and economic inequalities and related changes ( May, 2012 ). As the effects of globalization (e.g., expanding commercial markets, weakened dominance from central state[s]) destabilize social and cultural reproduction mechanisms (Heller, 2003 , 2010 ), space is opened up for new local orders. That is, globalization is rapidly changing the conditions that underlie ideologies of language, such as meaning-making, social categories and relationships, and political and economic constraints. This is important to the study of language shift and revitalization because of the mediating role of language in reproducing the social and moral orders of a place. Current research on minority languages hones in on situational practices to understand how linguistic and cultural resources are valued and exchanged locally.

As language research has moved away from presuming to link inhabitants of nation-states with distinct languages, researchers have also questioned the utility and viability of monolithic ethnicity-language associations (e.g., Leung et al., 1997 ; Lyons, 2009 ). Current research views notions of belonging and membership as critical to current identity work across minority language contexts ( Hornberger, 2014b ; Temples, 2013 ), though, as suggested in the section on “Critical Approaches,” it also strives to ideologies that view language as a primary marker of static identity ( May, 2005 ; Vickers and Deckert, 2013 ). This work tends to conceive of language as an instrument or repertoire that individuals call upon to evoke and resist ideologies in their construction of identities that are multiple, situational, and hybrid ( Canagarajah, 2011 ; De Fina, 2007 ; Hult, 2014 ). Poststructural work in these contexts links site-specific practices and ideologies to broader global discourses that shape minority language maintenance trajectories. In the spirit of the critical and poststructural trends described in earlier sections of this chapter, below we avoid context-specific and population-specific characterizations of “core issues and current debates.” Rather, we organize this section around three shared themes taken up by researchers across the contexts and populations outlined in the introduction of the chapter: (a) purism/standardization, (b) essentialism/authenticity, and (c) personal identity/heteroglossia.

This section expands on our descriptions of critical and poststructural research in the field, illustrating how this trio of themes forms a sort of core for scholarship that cuts across populations (minority, indigenous, immigrant) and processes (shift, maintenance and revitalization), highlighting the ways in which minority language speakers and learners negotiate structural and ideological constraints with respect to language use in conjunction with current geopolitical trends. We present research illustrating each of these themes; evident in this research is a poststructuralist rejection of neutrality, described in the previous section, and examination of how policies and practices at local and global levels influence, mitigate, and repair the sociolinguistic disparities in these contexts. For instance, international migration patterns provide a context for examining “Quichua language practices and local language policy” in families and communities in King and Haboud’s ethnographic research in Saraguro, Ecuador, documenting how large-scale forces of globalization have “overwhelmed” local progressive Quichua revitalization policies (2011: 143). Situationally derived work like that of King and Haboud, along with cases we present in this chapter, attends to language alongside extralinguistic factors, reconceptualizing language as a process or a mediator rather than as an object or endpoint. A focus on language produced in interaction at specific sites reveals salient multiscale discourses and ideologies that alternately (and concomitantly) emerge depending upon the linguistic context in question.

Purism and Standardization

Current work highlights the ways in which purism and standardization have been taken up across populations striving for language maintenance and revitalization. For instance, Leonard’s (2008) description of the processes of reclaiming the “formerly sleeping language” of Miami provides an example of how one community contests prescriptivist notions of a static “pure” language, an ideology that persists in numerous minority language contexts. Leonard defines purism as “the ideology that a language has a given ‘correct’ form and that its transmission and use should follow certain established patterns” (2008: 29) and notes that Miami speakers have had to confront this by reconciling with the fact that language learners “will speak an anglicized version of Miami” (2008: 29). Studies in heritage language education, in particular, suggest that it is not only the subject material that is contested by various ideological positions (i.e., which variety/ies of language to teach?), but also the nature of the pedagogy (i.e., how should it be taught?) and the teachers and learners themselves (i.e., who is qualified to teach? who is qualified to learn?) that are subjects of debate (Beaudrie and Ducar, 2005; Helmer, 2010 ). As evident in the following, current research emphasizes how discourses of purity and standardization are often intertwined with notions of essentialism and personal identity in contexts of language learning and language use.

A salient example of research that troubles discourses of purity and standardization comes from Hawaii, where the growing success of Hawaiian language revitalization “nests,” immersion schools, and community programs has brought forth pressing issues of balancing authenticity with the linguistic needs of communicating in and about modernity. As documented in Wong’s (1999) study of ke komike Hua’olelo Hou , a committee dedicated to facilitate the modernization of the Hawaiian lexicon for educators and community members, ideologies of purity and standardization can be divisive issues among language activists and educators in the community. Here, liberal stances authorizing usage-based standardization were criticized by conservative opposition, who claimed that impure versions of the Hawaiian language would corrode the integrity of the Hawaiian language through “contamination.” Wong’s research shows how adherence to prescriptivist “purist” ideologies can falsely imbue language with a sense of morality that reproduces colonial systems of authority.

This tension between prescriptivist purism and descriptivist accommodation remains a topic of debate in revitalization contexts elsewhere in the world, as evident in Lyons’s critique of current hybridity discourses in language and culture. While acknowledging the conceptual roots of “hybridity” as a third space outside the colonial binary, Lyons maintains that it is also a construct that stands in opposition to the “boundedness” of sovereignty and as “something that emanates from precisely the ‘Western,’ white oppressor” (2009: 92). In Indigenous language revitalization contexts, purity and standardization connect to struggles surrounding community authenticity and identity. Furthermore, these discourses may be historically recursive, as individuals and communities invoke ideologies of their historical oppressors (e.g., a standard language functions to unite its speakers) in the name of revitalization.

Tufi’s work on Sardinian maintenance and standardization controversies provides another example of how tensions in the language attitudes around purity and standardization of the minority language–speaking people play out with structural recursivity on the ground (2013). She interprets responses from a 2007 survey, contextualized with the sociohistoric background of Sardinian and local responses to the publication of editions of a manual for standardizing written Sardinian in the name of language maintenance. Tufi connects these discourses from the manual to essentialist critiques of some language rights positions whereby minority language advocates engaged in standardization end up reproducing majority language standardization practices of erasure in the name of the greater good. In the introduction of the widely distributed Sardinian orthography manual, Tufi sees “striking elements of standard language ideology” (2013: 152) (e.g., the historicization of particular varieties, references to language purity, references to prestige) that were so uncompromisingly monoglot as to elicit public outcry. Though she finds similar discourses in community responses from the Sardinian language survey, Tufi also presents evidence of survey respondents taking up Language Citizenship discourses, which are decentralized, pluralistic, and focused on speakers locally as the primary stewards of change in language concerns. The majority of these respondents indicated an appreciation for Sardinian language varieties other than their own, they acknowledged the importance of family and community domains in language maintenance, and they rejected the idea of choosing a standard of Sardinian that is “a variety of compromise” (2013: 155). Tufi’s research reveals some of the internal and external tensions around language maintenance in local and broader contexts.

This research from Hawaii and Sardinia illustrates how critical approaches to understanding the circulating discourses of linguistic purity and standardization in these contexts can trouble structural recursivity (i.e., the reproduction of dominant, majority language discourses in endangered and minority language contexts) in community efforts at maintenance and revitalization. Furthermore, this work illustrates how discourses of purity do not circulate in isolation, but are intertwined with other discourses concerning construction of authenticity, essentialism, and personal identity.

Authenticity and Essentialism

Discourses around authenticity and essentialism comprise a second theme in current research across populations and processes. The research presented in this section highlights how authenticity and essentialism are constructed in ways that closely resemble the ideological battles over linguistic purity that we discussed earlier. This research critiques how discourses around authenticity lead to essentialism (i.e., linking linguistic behavior to “intrinsic” essences of a language or people). For instance, authenticity is at the heart of arguments over official kreyòl orthography in Haiti, which led Schieffelin and Doucet to suggest that questions such as “What is the real, authentic kreyòl ?” really were asking, “Who is the real, authentic Haitian?” (1994: 190).

Another recent example of research that critiques discourses of authenticity can be found in the case of Leeman and Modan’s analysis of the linguistic landscape of Washington, DC’s Chinatown, where essentialist ideologies underpin the gentrification of the neighborhood (2009). Acknowledging globalization’s influence in “the commercialization of the public sphere,” (2009: 333) Leeman and Modan rework the linguistic landscape framework (i.e., an ideological representation of language in space) to show how municipal language policies privilege the minority language (in this case, Chinese) as a symbol of cultural authenticity, de-privileging its communicative value. Leeman and Modan trace the migration patterns of people in and out of Chinatown over time. Prior to gentrification in the 1990s, Chinatown was one of the few places where the Chinese immigrant community could own and run businesses, and it was a place where “Chinese language was linked to Chineseness” (2009: 350). During and after the period of gentrification and municipal development, many Chinatown residents moved to the suburbs and the number of non-Chinese-owned franchises increased dramatically.

Leeman and Modan cite city policies as encouraging maintenance of Chinese “ambiance” and driving these new, non-Chinese-owned stores to frequently translate their names and non-essential product information into Chinese text in commercial signage, showing how neoliberal emphases on branding has two outcomes (2009). It results in the commodification of ethnicity, reducing language to a symbol of this commodity; and also separates language from the people who write and speak it, essentializing Chinese language and culture while also replacing it with the majority language, English, in Chinatown’s economic domain.

Essentialist ideologies are central to critical examinations of commodification discourses, particularly as language plays “an increasingly central economic role” in the global economy ( Heller 2003 : 104). While the Leeman and Modan study shows how a focus on authenticity can essentialize cultures and languages as rather monolithic entities, globalization can also have the effect of commodifying multiculturalism and multilingualism as ideologies continue to privilege the “authentic” while also redefining the label, often along standard monolingual norms ( Heller, 2003 ). In minority language contexts, this reimagining of authenticity can occur not only spatially, but also temporally, in political efforts to unpack historical contexts alongside the modern forces of globalization.

Liyanage and Canagarajah’s consideration of local language policy in Sri Lanka (2014) troubles this very thing, uncovering discourses of essentialism linking language to the nation-state and global job market. The denial of language rights for minority Tamils is seen by many as a key grievance in the Sri Lankan civil war. Thus the promotion of multilingualism for the purpose of interethnic peace has been a primary concern for political leadership in Sri Lanka. Liyanage and Canagarajah (2014) trace Sri Lankan language practices through history, providing strong evidence that mutual respect for languages and multilingualism was the norm in numerous aspects of daily life (e.g., religious practices, administrative circles, poetry) before colonialism imposed English hegemony. Recalling this history, Liyanage and Canagarajah situate the current popular desire for trilingualism (Sinhalese, Tamil, and English) in the modern context of postcolonial globalization. Despite appearances of Sri Lankan language policy leaning toward this trilingualism in a ten-year plan promoting all three national languages, English teachers in Sri Lanka outnumber their “national language” teacher colleagues by a ratio greater than six to one. This mismatch between language policy rhetoric and actual language education practices indicates an orientation to essentialized conceptions of language, national identity, and multilingualism as a commodity in the global market.

These examples from Chinatown in Washington, DC, and post–civil war Sri Lanka show how globalization can influence language policy-writing toward neoliberal (i.e., liberal economic policies that favor privatization of industry and open, unregulated markets) versions of multiculturalism. Municipal policies encouraging Chinese authenticity in a Washington, DC, neighborhood and national policies toward balanced trilingualism involving two local languages and English in Sri Lanka are just two ways that the outcomes of these essentializing policies result in commodified conceptions of language, culture, and even multilingualism.

Heteroglossia and Personal Identity

A third theme of research across the language processes and populations is that of heteroglossia and personal identity. As with the other themes presented in this section, heteroglossia and personal identity are often intertwined with related discourses of purity and essentialism. Heteroglossia in current research is an analytic perspective that sees a dialogic and constitutive relationship between linguistic and social diversity ( Hornberger, 2014a ). This perspective provides an alternative to dominant models of bilingualism that views “language as the sum of 1 + 1 = 2” ( García, 2009b : 378), that is, as separate modes, autonomous in the mind of the learner. As scholars reimagine damaging discourses and ideologies across contexts and scales, they consider the complexities of the heteroglossic linguistic ecologies that comprise today’s minority language communities ( McCarty, 2011 ). This heteroglossia is inherent in the experiences of many minority language speakers and also in the discourses around purism and essentialism that manifest across a broad spectrum of contexts, intersecting and embedded with discourses of personal identity.

A common sociolinguistic research approach to understanding these identity discourses is through examinations of specific linguistic forms in interaction. This is the approach taken by Atkinson and Kelly-Holmes in their analysis of the language attitudes and ideologies behind a comedy radio show in Ireland (2011). Their analysis focuses on an episode of code-switching between the majority language English and the minority language Irish because of its cultural and sociological significance as an indicator of a given language’s status. The comedian in the sketch, Hector Ó hEochagáin, is seen in popular Irish media as an agent of the phenomenon of “Irish cool” whereby the Irish language is gaining in visibility and cultural and social capital. He speaks Irish as a second language and his Irish is famously imperfect, yet this imperfection works to resonate with a younger audience of Irish learners. Ó hEochagáin’s use of a learner variety of Irish makes his humor accessible to low proficiency learners while still indexing his audience’s shared ethnic Irish identity. As Atkinson and Kelly-Holmes unpack the intended humor of the radio sketch, their analysis shows how the satire works by relying upon shared language attitudes and ideologies of ethnolinguistic identity and ownership, where the researchers note some contradictory ambivalence (2011). Rather than indexing a shared sense of “Irish-ness,” the code-switching and language parody serve to exoticize Irish, which in turn legitimizes a specific variety of Irish—Irish as a second language. This case highlights the way minority language users negotiate different linguistic identities within the same polity, and questions discourses around minority language speakers and ethnolinguistic identity.

Research that spotlights intergenerational reimaginings of identity speaks to the shifting forces that exert influence on minority language speakers across places and periods of time. Such is the case with Nicholas’s ethnographic study of Hopi youth (2011), in which participants reimagine ideologies linking personal identity and language proficiency. For fluent speakers, Hopi language use indexes a specific Hopi identity, yet for Nicholas’s Hopi youth of varying proficiencies, cultural identity is expressed through “doing” Hopi culture. Nicholas contextualizes her participants’ cultural practices within domains of Hopi epistemology in naming, familial relationships, spiritual practices/rituals, and agricultural practices to reconceptualize Hopi “language as cultural practice” (2011: 53). Just as cultural practices are embedded in Indigenous language use, so is language embedded in cultural practices. Nicholas’s study questions traditional notions of language proficiency as a primary indicator of ethnic identity, highlighting the meanings of messages associated with culture practices, beyond the words alone.

This theme of heteroglossia and personal identity is also evident in research of heritage language education contexts. Blackledge et al. (2008) focus on understanding the linguistic practices of multilingual students and teachers in Bengali schools in Britain, revealing attitudes and ideologies around what constitutes “language” and what constitutes “heritage.” Most administrators and teachers in this study promote “pure” identities for their learners by emphasizing the superiority of Bengali (the national “literate” language of Bangladesh) over Sylheti (the vernacular spoken language of most of the Bangladeshi immigrants to Britain) despite their near mutual intelligibility. The discourses of essentialism described by Blackledge et al. in this context take the form of static, symbolic representations of Bangladesh, taught as content through the medium of the Bengali language. When these discourses are challenged in student-teacher interaction, the teacher’s response evokes the ideology on which the school was founded: the students must learn Bengali because they are Bengali (2008: 546), and essentializes the learners’ identities to match the static symbolic forms that comprise the school’s subject matter. The authors find that youth not only resist the identities imposed upon them by the school, but also are quite innovative in how they negotiate their subject positions in interactions.

Current critical scholars take seriously the potential for essentializing learners based on a perceived relationship to the target language, and Blackledge et al.’s attention to this work reflects not only an awareness of these ideologies in heritage language education contexts, but also a desire to problematize the complexities of parallel and intersecting language ideologies within a larger construct of authenticity. In each of the studies discussed here, researchers exposed and questioned circulating discourses of purity/standardization, essentialism and authenticity, and heteroglossia and personal identity. These three themes are not only evident across multiple contexts, but also exist alongside and are entangled with one another.

Perspectives for the Future and Conclusion

Expansions upon the current critical work take up new approaches to language and modernity, and they reconceptualize language maintenance and sustainability through examinations of multilingualism and identity in contexts of changing technology, human migration patterns, and global social orders. Though many central questions remain unanswered, this section presents new turns in minority language and revitalization contexts. We present cases that highlight how future research goes beyond critiques of discourses of endangerment and essentialism as theorists reimagine language and language users, and minority language speakers increasingly engage in research and language activism.

Technological developments present new opportunities for interaction and new modes of communication. For instance, in Blommaert and Velghe’s ethnography of learning textspeak , we see how developments in technology influence a reimagining of language and learning (2014). This work approaches new languages of technology through analysis of the language practices of a multilingual woman, Linda, from Wesbank in South Africa, whose literacy skills are likely hampered by dyslexia. Linda negotiates communication via an online social networking platform through the sign system textspeak , though Linda’s use of textspeak is not as language, but rather as “a deployment of voice—a sign system that opens channels of peer-group communication and conviviality, and establishes and confirms Linda’s place in her network of friends” (2014: 151–152). Despite the collaborative and negotiable nature of language in interaction, Linda appears fluent only within a rigid regime of individual linguistic practices. Her language makes sense to those around her, but only when she is able to order her textspeak according to her stringent method. In their analysis of Linda’s language practices, Blommaert and Velghe examine how she produces voice through processes of ordering signs that effect normed indexical meanings. Presenting Linda’s language proficiency in textspeak as an indexical sign system rather than a linguistic sign system, Blommaert and Velghe expand upon current conceptions of an individual’s linguistic repertoire and learning. By advocating an indexical approach to language use and voice , they expand opportunities for richer understandings of innovative language use for communicating in new technology-mediated registers.

A focus on language as voice , as opposed to language as skill, is potentially productive in numerous contexts, technological developments notwithstanding. Pitkäinen and Pitkänen-Huhta (2014), for instance, examine voice and agency among Sámi children by showing how multilingual and multimodal drawing and literacy tasks reveal the dynamic and sophisticated multilingual repertoires of Sámi children in a classroom in Finland. The researchers’ embrace of collaborative action research as a methodology is an extension of the activist research approaches found in numerous current language revitalization contexts. With a class of six- to ten-year-olds and another class of ten- to twelve-year-olds, they conducted a set of participatory language activities that were intended to validate children’s multilingual resources, honor their Sámi language, and increase awareness of multilingualism in their classroom.

These activities were scaffolded by pre-activity discussions around multilingual practices, pre-activity group decisions on language policy for the activities, and post-activity sharing and discussion. The drawings and books produced by the children included themes of language-as-mobility, themes of heteroglossia with existing and invented languages, and adherence to class language policy (i.e., only expressing language variety within Sámi). Pitkäinen and Pitkänen-Huhta’s participants relied on established resources and bounded understandings of language, while also creating new languages, new genres, and new “spaces for heteroglossic languaging” (2014: 154). This notion of a “third space” as a way for youth to negotiate multiple belongings is not a new construct, but it is continually being clarified by work on minority language identity and hybridity. Rather than conceiving of hybridity as an individual’s rational choice to enact a specific existing alternate identity as a means of bridging multiple competing cultural demands, this work combats essentialism by offering a more dynamic and situational understanding of the relationships between identity, language, and culture ( May, 2005 ). As globalization processes establish heteroglossic contexts around the world, multilingual identities grow more diverse and innovative in their enactments.

As an approach to identity in interaction, heteroglossia allows us to see participants using language and signs to index their roles and positions in the world. In their work at a Panjabi weekend school in Britain, Blackledge and Creese (2014) examine a stretch of talk between young learners and their teacher during a break. The general content of this talk centers around celebrity gossip and television. Blackledge and Creese undertake a heteroglossic analysis of this talk that illustrates how the participants construct and contest identities in brief and rapid situational dialogue. Their analysis shows how celebrity names become emblematic of a particular set of values. The talk participants may then align or distance themselves from these values through affirmation or disapproval of these celebrities. At one point in the talk, a participant invokes racialized categories, expressing marginalization that would appear to align her with an Indian identity (that undoubtedly indexes another set of values and beliefs), but moments later, some ambiguity enters the conversation and suddenly this Indian-ness (and all the attached values, beliefs, and ideologies) becomes negotiable. Blackledge and Creese demonstrate how ideologies indexed in the interaction are also negotiated within that interaction. In minority language contexts where youth can draw on shared rich linguistic and cultural repertoires, a heteroglossic lens allows for examination of identity negotiation relative not only to other participants in the interaction, but also relative to broader social and cultural contexts. This approach treats identity as being enacted through signs, not just main language use—an approach that is well suited for conceptions of language that move beyond siloed “solitudes.”

When borders cease to be barriers for movement and boundaries for language, as with transnational youth, a more ecological and situational approach to multilingualism, like heteroglossia, is fitting. Similarly, the concept of translanguaging is gaining ground as a pedagogy that can enhance and amplify the voices of language-minoritized students ( García, 2009a ). This approach normalizes bilingualism and eradicates language hierarchy through recognition of the often purposeful language alternation across modalities. Hornberger and Link (2012) take this up with their push for the continua of biliteracy as an educational approach, particularly for minority language multilinguals in the United States. This construct incorporates notions of transnational literacies (i.e., literacy practices that draw on resources and reference knowledge extending across national borders) with translanguaging to promote flexible language policies that contest monolingual national policies.

Hornberger’s model of multiple, intersecting vectors (or “continua”) represents the interrelationships between bilingualism and literacy, along with all of the contexts through which they develop (2012). In Hornberger and Link’s most recent (2012) iteration of this model, they put forth several scenarios that demonstrate how translanguaging and biliteracy can be encouraged in education contexts (e.g., through intentional pedagogy, space to move in and out of languages in interaction). Hornberger and Link’s examples are intended to counter current approaches to language and literacy in the United States and elsewhere that view literacy as a neutral and context-free skill to be obtained. The continua of biliteracy enable policymakers across local and national levels to activate the linguistic and literacy repertoires of students. This opens up pedagogical space for the minority languages and literacies in an emergent bilingual’s repertoire. It supports language sustainability and reduces the assimilationist pressure toward subtractive bilingualism, validating all aspects of a learner’s repertoire.

Future approaches to minority language maintenance reimagine language as “voice” or “signs” that index a user’s values, beliefs, and subjectivity, rather than seeing language as a discrete entity. Similarly, progressive research expands on current understandings of relevant contextual forces. Borders are obscured, timescales are stretched and contracted, and multilingualism/multiliteracy is enabled or disabled ( Blommaert et al., 2005 ). As technology and globalization mediate more language contact across domains, research in minority language maintenance must take into account that “rather than assuming that homogeneity and stability represent the norm, mobility, mixing, political dynamics, and historical embedding are now central concerns” ( Blackledge and Creese, 2014 : 1).

As highlighted here, scholarly approaches to studying language sustainability and revitalization have changed markedly over the last decade. While early research tended to adopt positivist, modernist approaches to answering questions about how and why languages were lost, maintained, or revitalized, recent work is characterized by a critical poststructuralist stance that recognizes the common tensions across these contexts and populations. Some notable current work simultaneously adopts both a “problem-centered” approach and a poststructuralist one. For example, Engman’s study of Ojibwe language “teacher-learners” ( Hinton, 2003 ) in a kindergarten classroom at a tribal school examines classroom language and the opportunities for interaction and language learning therein, while concomitantly linking the language of the local space to larger circulating ideologies that shape the language practices of less proficient language teachers engaged in revitalization ( Engman, 2017 ). This work, like that of many other current researchers, seeks innovation at local levels that questions and connects with larger discourses of language and society, with aims of resonance and advocacy rather than dispassion (e.g., Flores and Schissel, 2014 ). Much of this research takes up critical themes of purism and standardization, authenticity and essentialism, and heteroglossia and personal identity. And as our review has highlighted, these are, and will continue to be in decades to come, pressing issues across contexts of language contact worldwide.

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Language Maintenance And Language Shift Endangered Languages Essay Examples

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Topic: Communication , Culture , Community , Democracy , Policy , World , Bible , Linguistics

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As the world becomes increasingly globalized, indigenous languages become more and more at risk of becoming extinct. Given the increasing industrialization and wider communication of superpowers such as the United States and China, the increasing presence of both Western and Eastern major languages and cultures has meant the overshadowing of many local and indigenous languages. This makes them fall into the realm of 'endangered languages,' languages and ways of speaking that threaten to become obsolete in the face of a modern communicative age. This phenomenon is known as 'language shift,' and indicates the moving of some languages into prominence over others. Despite these dangers, there are efforts to exercise 'language maintenance,' or means of preserving and holding the indigenous languages of a people as their primary (or continually present) form of communication. In this essay, the ideas of language maintenance and language shift will be examined in detail, particularly as they pertain to endangered languages.

Language shift can be defined as the instance when a community slowly loses its ability or desire to speak their native language and/or its functions in lieu of a majority language - one spoken by a greater number of people outside the community (or provides them with greater communicative and socioeconomic opportunities). This shift occurs for many reasons - a desire to join a greater community, a need or want for the material resources that majority culture outside the enclave wants, etc. This results in the language, and many cultural and symbolic associations that go with it, becoming much less of a factor in these smaller native cultures (Pauwels, p. 720). Sometimes, legislation and official policies can be created to ban or restrict the use of some languages, facilitating assimilation into other cultures at the expense of the native culture's unique language (Romaine, p. 2). These types of policies ostensibly create a more globalized community, but also induces homogeneity and dilutes the unique facets of indigenous and minority cultures at the behest of the majority. As a result of these policies and cultural shifts, endangered languages are created.

There are many examples of language shift, both big and small, that have occurred throughout world history. The diminishing of the Irish language started in the mid-20th century, when Irish was traded for English as a means of achieving economic mobility in England (Romaine, p. 8). Many African languages, including that of the Lenape tribe and its Unami language, are also beset with language shift due to the increasing Anglicizing of Africa (Hoffmann, 2009). In these societies, powerful languages have been traded for more economically sensible ones, and smaller cultures are in the process of being usurped by bigger ones.

According to reports, there are fewer than 7,000 languages left in the world; nearly four-fifths of the earth's population speaks one of 83 languages (Hoffmann, 2009). The remaining 6,000 are considered endangered languages. Endangered languages are defined as languages that are "at risk of losing all of [their] speakers" (Hoffman, p. 12). Often, endangered languages are not being learned by new generations of speakers, either due to the influx of more prevalent languages or the slow decline of new language teachers. It is theorized that most of these 6,000 languages will die out by the end of the century (Hoffmann, 2009).

One interesting distinction that must be made is that, unlike endangered species, "extinct" languages can be reawakened if there is sufficient historical documentation of that language. To that extent, some languages can never truly die. However, this also sequesters the presence of said language from endangered into "sleeping" status, where it becomes a nonexistent part of the current culture of its indigenous speakers. To that end, a piece of the native culture is said to die along with the language, as many reawakened languages are not brought back by the native peoples who spoke it, but by language scholars who are not using it to provide communication.

Endangered languages are said to be important due to the value they provide to the linguistic research community. Forms and styles contained within endangered languages are often unique and not found in more prevalent and well-studied languages. By examining endangered languages, subtleties and new discoveries in intonation are often found, providing new ways to communicate that are not shared among majority languages. Furthermore, endangered languages are seen from a historical point of view as being essential to the essence and culture of many indigenous peoples, and provide a link to their past. With that in mind, endangered languages must be maintained as best as possible.

How can endangered languages be preserved so that they do not end up extinct or sleeping? Language maintenance can be defined as "a situation in which a speaker, or group of speakers, or a speech community continue to use their language in some or all spheres of life despite competition with the dominant or majority language to become the main/sole language in these spheres" (Pauwels, p. 719). It is closely tied with language shift as one of the two facets of language contact, and represents the active fight against language shift. Without language maintenance, language death occurs, in which the community stops using the language completely.

Language maintenance is often promoted by a number of factors and forces, which by extension slow down the process of language shift altogether (Pauwels, p. 725). First, language maintenance often depends on whether or not there is an early point of immigration of the native language into an individual. The earlier the introduction of an endangered language into the people of a society, the more likely it is that they will adopt that as their dominant language. Linguistic enclaves must be maintained in order for language maintenance to take hold; these self-sufficient communities keep these languages alive. The presence of parochial schools within a community also lends itself to a religious or community based language education as opposed to the secular majority found outside these enclaves. Finally, language maintenance must be exposed to people before they emigrate out of an enclave and into environments dominated by other languages, in order to preserve that connection to the previous language.

In conclusion, the process of exploring endangered languages depends greatly upon the tightly-knit relationship between language shift and language maintenance. Language shift occurs because of societal factors and increasing globalization, dwindling indigenous languages down into endangered status. Language maintenance includes the methods by which these languages are prevented from becoming sleeping or extinct languages, and keeps an important aspect of indigenous cultures alive through the promotion of language maintenance.

Works Cited

Hoffmann, Maureen. Endangered Languages, Linguistics, and Culture: Researching and Reviving the Unami Language of the Lenape. Bryn Mawr College, May 2009. Dissertation. Pauwels, Anne. "Language Maintenance." Handbook of Applied Linguistics. ed. Alan Davies, Catherine Elder. Blackwell Publishing. pp. 719-737. Print. Romaine, Suzanne. "The Impact of Language Policy on Endangered Languages." International Journal on Multicultural Studies vol. 4, no. 2, p.1. 2002. Print.

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I.T.I LANGUAGE CENTER

"BRINGING EXCELLENCE TO LANGUAGE LEARNERS"

Language Shift, Language Death, and Language Maintenance

Introduction

Language and culture are two fields that cannot be separated to each other. They are always related and dependent one another. In the field of Language and Culture, there are several terminologies that perhaps some of you are not familiar, however, they are used and customized in our society in the course of the time. In this article, author would like to share some of them; they are Language Shift, Language Death, and Language Maintenance.

Linguist have been searching and researching the development of language contact. They also successfully found the languages that are shifted, died, or maintained by the origin speakers. In this essay, the elaboration of language shift, language death, and language maintenance are related to each other particularly in the examples.

Language Shift

Generally, when the speakers of a language consider that their own language is not really suitable to be spoken anymore, it usually follows with the changing of the origin language to another language that is more appropriate for them. “When a group progressively abandons its language of origin, at the same time adopting the language of the socially or economically dominant group” (Fishman 1971, Baker-Jones 1998). While Andersen stated that “the language shift is a process in which successive generations of speakers, both at individual and at community levels, gradually lose proficiency in their mother-tongues or the language of their speech community in favour of other languages” ( 2009, p. 1) The language is shifted highly in the bilingual and multilingual nations (Jagodic, 2011, p. 195).

A clear idea of the occurrence of language shifting is made Fishman (1964, 1991) with his Domain Theory . “When one language gets an expanded domain of use over others there is the tendency for bilingual speakers to shift to it”. There is also the possibility that the speakers tend to use the prestigious-considered language instead of their mother tongue with the reason it makes them have higher status in the society.

A well-known language shifting example is the “English only” in America where most of Native Americans were forced to use English instead of using their mother tongue (Janse, 2002, p. 352). It was started from the amendment of Arizona that proposed the “English only” in 1988 and adopted by Utah government to force their people to use English. Thus, the government policy is one of the factors of language shifting as well as the language maintenance.

Another example of language shifting is from Anderson (2009) in his study of Ghanaians language. He found that the Ghanaian parents exposed their children to use English, their ex-colonial language, in every day language and in the school. “These parents believe that the acquisition of English as a first language would enhance their children’s intellectual, social, and economic development” (Anderson, 2009, p. 7).

Language Death

Simple understandings of language death noted from the language shifting is that when the speakers leave their mother tongue and use other language, the mother tongue, slowly or quickly disappear. Campbell (1994, p. 1961) described the language death as “the loss of a language due to gradual shift to the dominant language in language contact situations”. There are four types of language death from Mesthrie and Leap (1995, p. 254):

Gradual death: gradual replacement due to language shift
Sudden death: rapid extinction, e.g. Tasmanian
Radical Death: due to severe political repression, e.g. the massacre of thousand Indian in El Salvador
Bottom-to-top death: not used in conversation, but survives in special use e.g. religion or folk songs.

English is also one of the major causes of the death other language. Cornish in England was disappeared after the speakers moved their mother tongue away to English (Mesthrie & Leap (1995, p. 253). While the case of Ghanaian language, some of Ghanaian regional languages were disappeared such as Nabit, Sisaala, and Likpapkaln because of English authority (Andersen, 2009, p. 11).

Language Maintenance

In order to avoid the phenomena of language shift and language death occur, language maintenance needs to be planned and executed in a nation. Language maintenance is the revitalization of a dying or endangered language. Mesthrie and Leap (1995, p. 253) describe the language maintenance as the continuing use of a language in the face of competition from a regionally and socially more powerful language. Many countries such as Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Scandinavia, Papua New Guinea, and others have initiated to revitalize their origin languages after the wars ended (Janse, 2002, p. 353).

Ways of maintaining the language such as education, documenting the language can be the alternative decision to revive the language. In Ghanaian case, their regional languages are maintained by the use of Media. Most of the radio announcers in Ghana use their mother tongue to deliver the news (Andersen, 2009, p. 2). They keep using the regional languages because they can give the news and their views clearer. The Media policy of Ghana also promotes all the television stations to use the regional languages to maintain their unity.

Anderson, J. (2009). A kente of many colours: Multilingualism as a complex ecology of language shift in Ghana. Sociolinguistic Studies. Pp. 1-20.

Baker, C., & Jones, S.P. (1998) Encyclopedia of bilingualism and bilingual education . Clevedon: Multilingual Matters

Campbell, L. (1994). Language death . Asher & Simpson 1994. 4. pp. 1960-1968

Fishman, J. (1971) The sociology of language . Rowley, MA: Newbury House

Janse, M. (2002). Introduction language death and language maintenance: problems and prospects. ( http://www.blonline.nl ) . pp. 9-20.

Jagodic, D. (2011). Between language maintenance and language shift: the slovenian community in italy today and tomorrow. ESUKA – JEFUL. Pp. 195 – 213.

The importance of keeping the preservation of the native language always have to be taught to ourselves. A very helpful article, thank you

Linguist have been searching and researching the development of language contact. They also successfully found the languages that are shifted, died, or maintained by the origin speakers.

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Language Shift by Nicholas Ostler LAST REVIEWED: 30 August 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 29 May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0193

Language shift: analysing language use in multilingual classroom interactions

Multilingualism in communities and schools

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Mapping the focus of multilingual teaching practices

A framework for mapping multilingual teaching focus

Re-examining multilingual classrooms

Text-in-context model: Theoretical framework

Structures of pedagogic exchanges

Language shift in classroom interactions

Structures of language shift in exchanges

Pedagogic functions of language shift

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Pedagogic relations: Acts and interacts

Pedagogic modalities: Sources and sourcing

Functions of language shift in a multilingual literacy lesson

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10 Language Shift and Sustainability: Critical Discourses and Beyond

Introduction

Historical Perspectives

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Critical Approaches

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Core Issues and Current Debates

Purism and Standardization

Authenticity and Essentialism

Heteroglossia and Personal Identity

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