Everything about Language Shift totally explained
Language shift, sometimes referred to as
language transfer or
language replacement or
assimilation, is the progressive process whereby a speech community of a
language shifts to speaking another language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a given mother tongue who speak another language more often in the home. The data is used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or most often across generations within a linguistic community.
The process whereby a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shift allegiance to the second language is called
assimilation. When a linguistic community ceases to use their original language, we speak of
language death.
Examples
Philippines
In the
Philippines,
Spanish-speaking families have gradually switched over to
English since the end of
World War II until the former eventually ceased to be a practical everyday language in the country.
Alsace
In
Alsace,
France, a longtime
Alsatian-speaking region; the native Germanic dialect all but disappeared as a useful language over the course of the 20th century, superseded by
French.
North America
Calvin Veltman ("Language Shift in the United States," 1983) has written extensively on the language shift process of a dozen minority language groups in the United States. Based on a 1976 study prepared by the Bureau of the Census, data show that rates of language shift and assimilation have been rising for the past fifty years in the United States. Immigrants of Spanish mother tongue are switching to English within two generations, and in the absence of continuing immigration, the language wouldn't survive more than two generations.
Quebecois French, widely spoken by French-Canadian immigrants in
New England in the early 20th century, has more or less disappeared from the U.S., replaced by English; a similar process has occurred in
Louisiana, a former French colony. Data published in McKay and Wong's "New Immigrants in the United States" confirm this picture with data from the 1990 Census.
This process has also been observed in Canada outside of
Quebec, where the rates of shift for French language minorities presage their disappearance. Meanwhile, in Quebec itself, the decline of French has been reversed, and given high rates of outmigration and substantial intermarriage with French Canadians, the English language is now faced with decline.
Ireland
See
History of the Irish language#Nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Social consequences
Language shift can be detrimental to at least parts of the community associated with the language which is being lost. Sociolinguists such as
Joshua Fishman, Lilly Wong Fillmore and Jon Reyhner report that language shift (when it involves loss of the first language) can lead to cultural disintegration and a variety of social problems including increased alcoholism, dysfunctional families and increased incidence of premature death.
For example, Ohiri-Aniche (1997) observes a tendency among many
Nigerians to bring up their children as monolingual speakers of English and reports that this can lead to their children holding their heritage language in disdain and feeling ashamed of being associated with the language of their parents and grandparents. As a result of this some Nigerians are said to feel neither wholly European nor wholly Nigerian.
Reversing
Joshua Fishman has proposed a method of
reversing language shift which involves assessing the degree to which a particular language is disrupted in order to determine the most effective way of assisting and revitalising the language. (See also
language revival).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Language Shift'.
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