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Introduction

Language loss refers to a societal or individual loss in the use or in the ability to use a language, implying that another language is replacing it. It is a very common phenomenon worldwide wherever languages are in contact. Language loss may be the result of subtractive bilingualism where a new language is learnt at the cost of the mother tongue (Lambert 1974), or it can be seen as the choice of a person who believes that ceasing to use a lower-status mother tongue will result in a better position in society or in higher prospects for the next generation. While this type of shift is often framed as “speaker’s choice ,” we can question if this kind of choice is really “free” as it is strongly influenced by unequal power relations between languages and language groups (Dorian 1993).

The issue of language loss on a large scale, ultimately leading to the extinction of entire languages, was brought to a wider audience by Krauss (1992) more than two decades ago. According to his estimates, only 600 languages, that is, fewer than 10 % of the languages spoken at that time, have good chances of surviving until the year 2100. One of the factors counteracting this trend is the corresponding effort at language revitalization. Efforts to bring back and strengthen small and threatened languages are being carried out today on all continents and under varying circumstances. This chapter provides discussion of previous and ongoing research on these issues as well as special questions and problems connected to this kind of research.

Early Developments and Major Contributions: Language Maintenance and Loss

The field of language maintenance, loss, shift, and revitalization, on individual as well as societal levels, is highly interdisciplinary, drawing from linguistics, sociology, education, psychology, anthropology, political science, and other fields as well. During the first decades of study, until the 1950s and 1960s, a distinct emphasis was put on the language loss and shift aspect, largely neglecting its opposite: language maintenance and revitalization. Explicit revitalization movements such as they manifest themselves today – and research on such movements – were rare at that time. Up through the 1970s, researchers generally expected that minority languages would disappear in due course. This was regarded as a natural development, and people engaged in language maintenance efforts were often considered to be backward-looking romantics, political separatists, or unrealistic idealists (cf. Dorian 1998). Minority languages were seldom associated with economic or political power, and therefore they were considered as having no future. In immigrant communities, individuals were mainly perceived to be concerned with learning the majority language of the host country, while the original language often lost importance or was taken for granted by its speakers.

In his classic 1953 work, Weinreich laid the foundation for the scholarly study of language contact. He defined language shift as “the change from the habitual use of one language to that of another” (p. 68). While placing substantial focus on language contact and interference, Weinreich emphasized that language shift was rather motivated by language-external factors (e.g., assimilative pressure in society, negative attitudes) than by language-internal ones (e.g., grammatical or lexical features). An early study by Haugen (1953) focused on language loss and shift among Norwegian speakers in the USA. He described language use and linguistic attitudes prevailing among Norwegian–Americans in the homes and in religious life and the impact of English on Norwegian dialects. Haugen described a typical process of language shift as a series of stages all the way from monolingualism in the minority language through several bilingual stages to monolingualism in the majority language. While paying most attention to language shift, both Weinreich and Haugen also noted that there were forces and sentiments within minority communities that actively counteracted language shift.

A third scholar, Joshua Fishman, also had a strong impact in this field. His early work, Language Loyalty in the United States (1966), focused on the support among immigrant groups for language maintenance efforts. Ever since his early research, Fishman strived to describe and analyze the feelings and positions of linguistically and culturally endangered groups and from early on openly stood in favor of language maintenance efforts in research and in practice.

In the 1970s, sociologically oriented studies were carried out in various language communities. For instance, in Sweden, sociologist Jaakkola (1973) detailed the strictly diglossic situation in Tornedalen in the 1960s, which was gradually paving the way to a language shift from the local Finnish variety to Swedish. Finnish was widely used by parents and elders, while the stigma attached to Tornedalen Finnish during almost a century of overt assimilation policies contributed to the common pattern of parents and grandparents speaking Swedish to their children and grandchildren. A well-known study on language death in a community was carried out by anthropologist Gal (1979), who showed how industrialization and urbanization contributed to language loss and shift among Hungarian speakers in Oberwart, Austria. When industrialization gained importance in Oberwart, the status of Hungarian declined as it was associated with peasant life. This led to a language shift from Hungarian to German, starting with the young generation. Another very influential work on societal language loss and death was linguist Dorian’s (1981) study of a Scots Gaelic community in East Sutherland. Although a stigmatized, lower-prestige variety, Gaelic had a strong covert prestige among its speakers as the sign of group loyalty and fisherman identity. A large-scale language shift from Gaelic to English started when the importance of fishing declined and the segregation of the Gaelic-speaking population in society eased.

The studies by Jaakkola, Dorian, and Gal reflect the importance of the status of minority languages and the status of the groups speaking the language as perceived by the speakers themselves, as well as by the surrounding society. If maintaining a certain language is perceived as a sign of backwardness, poverty, or lack of formal education, shift to the dominant language is easily seen as the best option. For immigrant minorities, this kind of option, often resulting in the loss of the original language, may appear as the only way to go, especially in a situation where immigrant parents are not informed of the possibility of bilingualism. Wong Fillmore (1991) describes how young children in the USA speaking a minority language at home rapidly lost their first language when they started preschool in the USA. Learning the new language was seen as a first priority, and the younger the children were when coming into contact with English, the sooner they started losing their original language.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, language loss gained increased scholarly attention. Greater focus was given to the context in which language loss took place, and there was a shift to more detailed, descriptive, and anthropologically oriented studies. By interviewing groups of Sámi about their language choices and attitudes in their lives decade by decade, Aikio (1988) described in detail a case of Sámi language shift in Finland. Kulick (1992) studied the shift from the local language Taiap Mer to Tok Pisin in a New Guinea village where contact with Europeans changed local ideas about cultural identity and where parental language socialization patterns favored language shift. Norberg (1996) showed in her study on language choice and language attitudes in a low Sorbian village in the former Eastern Germany that a political change favoring cultural maintenance was not able to halt the continuing language shift to German. In these studies, as in several earlier ones, educational and employment opportunities, marriage patterns, or migration contributed to language shift, but views and attitudes toward one’s own culture and their impact on language choice patterns in individual homes were given greater focus.

Recent and Current Work: Language Revitalization

Many studies worldwide demonstrate the persistence of minority language speakers to maintain their languages against seemingly overwhelming odds. This kind of persistence, often regarded with surprise and even suspicion by some nonmembers, is a common feature in the context of community-based language maintenance and revitalization. Studies on language shift typically address situations where subordinate languages give way to more powerful and prestigious ones in a minority/majority constellation, while in language revitalization the process is slowed down or halted, and former subordinate languages rise in status and prestige.

Many revitalization efforts are connected with ethnic revival movements present in many parts of Europe and elsewhere since the 1960s but also with many nationalistic movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the earlier cases, subordinate languages were not necessarily endangered at all, as for instance in the case of Norwegian in Norway and Finnish in Finland in the nineteenth century, but they were lacking in prestige and political power. In both the Norwegian and Finnish movements, the goal was to enhance the status of subordinate languages, while earlier nationalist movements typically promoted monolingualism and monoculturalism . Many modern ethnic revival movements promote multilingualism and the idea of several cultures living side by side (Huss and Lindgren 2011).

Ethnic revival has meant a new pride in formerly stigmatized languages and identities. In many parts of the world, ethnic movements start when the indigenous and minority languages are already seriously endangered, and the revitalization of the language is often seen as a crucial part of the overall ethnic revival. For instance, social scientist Stordahl (1996) observed in the Norwegian Sámi movement in the 1970s, that part of the movement was transforming the image of the Sámi language from that of a “dying language ” to a “mother tongue” (p. 146).

Revitalization is commonly understood as giving new life and vigor to a language that has been steadily decreasing in use. It can be seen as a reversal of an ongoing language shift (cf. Fishman 1991), or it can be regarded as “positive language shift .” As King (2001) has observed, it is “possible to conceptualize language shift as positive or negative, referring to either the gain or loss of a group’s language, and thus encompassing all societal-level processes of language change” (p. 12). This view is especially useful when trying to describe the often contradictory tendencies present in many language contact situations. The revitalization process is hardly ever unidirectional; both assimilation and conscious revitalization within the minority group take place side by side (Huss and Lindgren 2011).

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there were more research on endangered languages and attention to the need to contribute to their survival, as well as discussion of critical issues (Crystal 2000; Grenoble and Whaley 1998; Hinton and Hale 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Researchers and practitioners presented examples of what could be done and has been done in order to curb language decline. Across several areas of research, one of the driving questions was why some languages survive and others do not. Also, what were the relevant factors when explaining what affects language maintenance and loss? Many attempts were made to pinpoint the most relevant factors and the ways in which they interacted (e.g., Crawford 2000; Crystal 2000; Edwards 1991; Fishman 1991; Stiles 1997).

A major advance in this direction was Fishman’s work (1991), the first large-scale attempt to construct a theory of language revitalization. He presented a Graded Intergenerational Dislocation Scale (GIDS) , a model assigning languages stages from one to eight, with the larger figures implying a more intensive disruption of the normal situation, a “more severe or fundamental threat to the prospects for the language to be handed on intergenerationally” (p. 87). Stage 8, the most threatened position, implies that the language is only used by some scattered, socially isolated old people, while at stage 1, cultural autonomy has been reached, with the language used in higher education and government as well as in the media nationwide. As can be seen in the name Fishman has given his typology, he regarded intergenerational transmission as the crucial factor in language shift reversal without which all other efforts are futile in the long run.

While acknowledging the importance of intergenerational transmission of minority languages, many researchers and practitioners engaged in grassroots revitalization saw education as a powerful agent of revitalization (e.g., McCarty 2002; Stiles 1997). The introduction of an endangered language in preschool and later education was, and often still is, expected to compensate for the typical lack of speakers among children and youth. Several studies around the world suggest, however, that revitalizing languages through schools is by no means an uncomplicated endeavor; even in circumstances where general attitudes toward the original language are becoming more and more favorable and the schools are officially expected to pay special attention to linguistic and cultural revitalization, the results often remain modest (Hornberger 2007; Huss et al. 2003; King 2001; Todal 2002). The schools might succeed in producing pupils with second language skills in the endangered language, but the problem remains how to go further and increase the number of pupils with high enough competence to maintain the language in the long run and, at best, to transmit it to their own children.

New Technologies and Language Revitalization

Globalization is often regarded as a major threat to endangered languages, and one of its aspects, modern information and communication technologies, has also been viewed with suspicion by language revitalists. Today, however, new possibilities offered by technology for documentation and mass circulation of linguistic material, online language education, and other activities on behalf of endangered languages have become a strong focus of interest among those who have access to modern technology – all groups do not have it. The privileged practitioners as well as researchers working in endangered language communities are now in the process of creating databases, tools, and techniques for the advancement of their languages.

For endangered language communities and individuals interested in language revitalization, information and communication technologies also offer new ways of networking and communicating. The social media give endangered language users the opportunity of creating their own virtual communities and networks bridging the gaps caused by language shift and helping isolated individual language learners practice their skills with others (e.g., Holton 2011, p. 371).

While the benefits of the new technologies in language maintenance are emphasized, critique has also been voiced. Eisenlohr (2004) discussed how practices of electronic mediation and language ideologies are necessarily embedded in, and are related to, the sociocultural processes of language obsolescence and revitalization. What does the fact that new technology not only mediates linguistic practice but also adds new forms and social functions to the language concerned mean in the context of cultural endangerment? The notion of minority language ownership and the role of speakers are also actualized when electronic media are used for documenting and spreading knowledge of a language worldwide (Henderson 2013). The scholarly discussion concerning the benefits, drawbacks, and ethical issues of modern technologies in the field of endangered languages is likely to continue and intensify in the future as a growing number of endangered language communities gain access to electronic resources. Holton (2011) cautions against an overreliance on the technology and reminds us that neither CD-ROMs, multimedia websites, electronic dictionaries, nor anything else can themselves revitalize a language or create new speakers. What information technology can do is to unite dispersed language communities and to “contribute to the development and appreciation of endangered languages in new terms” (Holton 2011, p. 398), something which is more likely to happen, as Holton points out, when endangered language speakers and learners become practicing creators, not only consumers of information technology.

Problems and Difficulties

From “Neutral Research” to Advocacy

Since the early 1990s, there has been active debate on the role of the researcher in maintenance, loss, and revitalization research. The central question was at first whether the researcher should (or even could) maintain a “neutral” position, observing and describing the endangered language and accepting its imminent death as natural. Or whether it was legitimate (or even desirable) that researchers become engaged in actively assisting the community in their language maintenance efforts. The latter position started gaining ground in the 2000s when more and more scholars were moving toward advocacy, some of them seeing the extinction of the world’s languages as serious a thing as the diminishing of biological diversity (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). However, what was described “responsible linguistics ,” “reformed linguistics ,” or “preventive linguistics ” was early on subject to suspicion and negative labeling (e.g., Edwards 2002).

Collaboration Between Researchers and Communities

Numerous conferences and workshops held during the last few decades in the field of language endangerment and revitalization have shown that close links have been established between researchers from various countries on one hand and between researchers and practitioners on the other hand. An early example of the latter is a series of symposia titled Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, which started already in 1994. The goal of the symposia series is to bring together indigenous language educators and to provide a forum for exchange of scholarly research on the teaching of indigenous languages (see http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/∼jar/History.html). An example of another kind of cooperation between endangered language speakers and scholars (linguists) is the Breath of Life Language Restoration Workshop series started by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival to enable individuals to reclaim their languages with the help of archival materials (http://www.aicls.org/#!breath-of-life/cd1c).

The general trend among researchers of endangered languages to collaborate with speaker communities for language promotion and to engage community members in research, and sometimes also in research publication, seems to be growing stronger in various parts of the world (cf. Cruz and Woodbury 2014; Granadillo and Orcutt-Gachiri 2011; Olthuis et al. 2013). As Granadillo and Orcutt-Gachiri stated, “our work grows out of a desire to both cast a critical eye on the situation of endangered languages and share theoretical tools to help researchers and communities change that situation” (p. 1).

While the ethical side – the need for researchers to “give something back” to the community and to empower community members – remains an important issue in this context, other benefits of researcher–community collaborations are also mentioned. Engaging community members in fieldwork as coresearchers (e.g., as in “collaborative” or “participatory” anthropology) also means that communities are given the right to define their own problems and to negotiate solutions which makes it the most efficient and adequate way to address local problems. Therefore, participation is not only about rights and ethics but also about efficacy (Roche et al. 2010, p. 156).

Collaborations are needed to build capacity so that communities will not be dependent on outside researchers in the long run. Also, in researcher–community cooperation, the local context with all its special features becomes central, which is essential. It appears harder and harder to understand language loss or language maintenance in a general way; it is necessary to study every particular speech community extensively in its special context to be able to, for example, design a language maintenance effort that would fit that specific situation (Sicoli 2011, pp. 163–164).

Dedicated and long-term work is also needed to build trust and avoid exploitation or breach of confidence. This can be challenging, irrespective of whether the researcher finds the settings for the fieldwork unfamiliar and culturally remote or seemingly familiar (Dorian 2014, p. 421) .

Defining “Success” Versus “Failure” in Language Revitalization

A special difficulty connected to research on language revitalization concerns defining when a revitalization movement has been successful and when not. Which criteria should be used to assess the outcome, and who should have the right to choose the criteria?

Different revitalization movements may have very different goals and also different ways of defining their own success or failure. Moreover, as Fishman aptly concluded about “failure,” “… it not only depends on the eyes of the beholder, but the same beholder may evaluate it differently on two different occasions separated by little if any elapsed time” (Fishman and García 2011, p. 5).

The stated goals vary from situation to situation and from case to case. In the case of extremely endangered or even moribund languages, the goal of documenting the language and promoting conversational competence in it might well be sufficient, while in other cases, the promoters of a language might aim, for instance, at promoting literacy in the language through school education (Reyhner 1999).

Another question is whether we can really assess the outcome by studying the situation as it is at a certain point of time, without knowing, and wisely refraining from guessing what will happen in the future. There are cases with a strong long-term tendency pointing toward language death when the situation suddenly alters and a new, opposite tendency appears. There are today many cases where a language that has not been spoken by anybody in decades is revived and taken into use in some domains (e.g., Amery 2000). Endangered language communities worldwide are challenging former negative prognoses about their languages by engaging in community efforts that are both “bringing the languages home” (Hinton 2013) and empowering their speakers.

Future Challenges

Ultimately, the fate of languages and language revitalization movements is sealed by language choices made by individuals and individual families. As has been shown in history, overt assimilation policies have not always been able to obliterate minority languages neither have supportive policies been able to guarantee the maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Speaker agency and personal language ideologies often turn out to play a more important role than the macrostructural context (Granadillo and Orcutt-Gachiri 2011, pp. 10–11).

It is therefore necessary to seriously take into consideration what community members think and feel about their languages and what their own language ideologies are in order to get a deeper understanding of the language loss or revitalization process. Reclaiming a language is rarely an easy process although the learner is strongly motivated (e.g., King and Hermes 2014). Strong negative feelings, painful memories, and conflicting personal language ideologies often seem to hinder language reclamation in spite of state policies explicitly promoting minority or indigenous languages.

Families as agents in responding to official language policies, and shaping their own ones, have during the past decade begun to attract more interest among researchers and are today a growing field of study. Individual families, not isolated but influenced by other significant domains with their respective language policies, such as neighborhood, preschool, school, and others, are sites where language policies are created and language choices made and reacted on, not only by the parents but also by their children. Family language policy-making in the context of language loss and revitalization still remains a largely unresearched area, while there are many documented examples of such endeavors (e.g., Hinton 2013).

Young people should also get their due focus in studies of language maintenance and revitalization, but research on teenagers and young adults is still very scarce in this context. The young are often viewed by leaders of revitalization movements as those who are prone to be influenced by the majority society and its dominant language ideologies, eager to leave the local community and adapt to urban life which is often seen as the greatest hindrance to revitalization efforts. Many movements seem at a loss when they find themselves unable to attract the younger generations to the degree they would like to.

However, some recent research shows that much of what was formerly taken for granted in many minority language situations is now questioned. One example is the common either-or character of language choices perceived to be available for young minority language speakers. They are supposed to be either maintaining the language and identity and staying in the community or shifting to the majority language and urban life for mobility, education, and employment. In reality, the alternative of having both exists for many. Multilingual speakers are now in research focus and the relevance of the “urban–rural divide” is questioned (e.g., May 2014).

Multilingual repertoires and abstention from strict linguistic norms are today characteristic of large numbers of multiethnic young people especially in greater urban centers. This reminds us of the claim from critical sociolinguistics that languages, bounded and strictly isolated from each other, are human inventions and should therefore be disinvented and reconstituted, in order to lead to less linguistic purism, to more acceptance of real-life individuals with fused multilingual repertoires, and thus to better conditions for minority language speakers (Makoni and Pennycook 2007).

The fact that particular languages or language varieties – however invented – nevertheless do play a significant role for certain ethnic identities is confirmed by a growing number of individual and community-based language reclamation projects worldwide. Even in the repertoire of a multilingual person, the minority language(s) can play an important role. Still, common problems emanating from the traditional view of languages as bounded and reified concepts remain to solve for revitalists: linguistic purism in language renewal inhibiting potential speakers, territorial restrictions regarding minority and indigenous language rights, and conflicting language ideologies inside and outside communities. More studies on generational as well as gender differences in responding to challenges of this kind are needed to shed more light on the prospects of community-based language revitalization.

Cross-References

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