LANE 422 SOCIOLINGUISTICS

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LANE 422 SOCIOLINGUISTICS

• Summarized From
• SOCIOLINGUISTICS
• An Introduction to Language and Society
• Peter Trudgill
• 4th edition. 2000,
• Prepared by
• Dr. Abdullah S. Al-Shehri

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Chapter 10

• Language and Humanity

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In the previous chapters..

• We looked at a number of cases in which
  irrational attitudes and discriminatory decisions
  often made by governments or other official
  bodies acting out of ignorance or prejudice, have
  led to language policies which have had
  detrimental effect on childrens education and
  even on societies as a whole.

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Also..

• We saw that the British government in the
  eighteenth century attempted to make the speaking
  of Gaelic illegal.
• We considered the way in which non-standard
  dialects of English, such as the African American
  Vernacular English (AAVE), have incorrectly been
  regarded as inferior or inadequate.
• We noticed the extent to which varieties of
  pidgin English were looked down on as broken
  English.
• We observed the political disadvantage at which
  speakers of minority languages such as Romany can
  often find themselves.

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In France..

• In 1994, a French minister tried to outlaw the
  use of English words in French, on the totally
  erroneous ground that the French language is
  under some kind of threat from English.

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In the USA..

• There has also been a powerful political movement
  in recent years, known as the English only
  movement, which has been attempting to exclude
  languages other than English from the
  educational, cultural and political life of many
  American states.
• Some of those in favor of this movement argue
  that the position of English is being threatened.

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How do such attitudes impact language?

• One of the very distressing consequences that
  attitudes of this type can have is language
  death.
• One of the questions linguists are often asked
  is how many languages are there in the world?
• It is not too inaccurate to say, however, that
  there are about 6000 languages in the world
  today.
• This number is most certainly smaller than it
  used to be and is getting smaller all the time.

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What happens is that..

• Communities go through a process of language
  shift.
• This means that a particular community gradually
  abandons its original native language in favor of
  another language.
• This has been a relatively common process in the
  sociolinguistic history of the world.

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Language shift is a prelude for language death

• Most of the population of Ireland were native
  speakers of Irish Gaelic.
• Now, the vast majority are native speakers of
  English.
• Before the Roman conquest, the population of much
  of what is now France were speakers of the Celtic
  language Gaulish.
• Subsequently, however, they shifted to the
  language of their conquerors, Latin, which
  eventually became French.
• Later on, the northern part of France was
  conquered by the Germanic-speaking Franks.
• These conquerors, however, eventually went
  through a process of language shift and ended up
  speaking French too.

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More on language shift..

• The Norwegian-speaking Vikings who subsequently
  conquered and settled in the part of northern
  France we now call Normandy also shifted from
  their Scandinavian language to French.
• A few generations later, as a result of the
  Norman conquest of England in 1066, these former
  Scandinavians took the French language to
  England.
• Once in England, however, it took the descendants
  of the Norman conquerors only a few generations
  before they shifted once again this time to
  English.

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In Europe..

• A number of languages have died even in quite
  recent times.
• Cornish, for example, died out in Cornwall in the
  eighteenth century.
• Manx, a close relative of Irish, lost its last
  native speaker on the Isle of Man in the 1950s.
• Many other European languages are currently under
  threat of dying out Scottish Gaelic, Breton in
  Brittany, Frisian in the Netherland and Germany,
  Sami in Scandinavia, and Romansch in Switzerland.

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In the Americas..

• The problem is much more serious.
• At the time of the first European contact in the
  fifteenth century, at least a thousand different
  languages were spoken.
• In the last 400 years, at least 300 of those
  languages have died out completely.
• Of the remaining 700, only 17 languages have more
  than 100,000 speakers, and only one of those,
  namely Navaho, is in North America.
• More than 50 languages have died in the USA alone
  since the arrival of Europeans.

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In the Pacific Ocean..

• The problem is even more serious.
• Perhaps as many as a quarter of the worlds
  languages are spoken in this area, and very many
  of them indeed are under threat of being lost
  totally.
• In Australia, for example, there used to be about
  200 aboriginal languages.
• Of these, 50 are already dead, and another 100
  are very close to extinction.

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What Causes Language Shift?

• There are very many, often complex, reasons why
  language shift takes place.
• Perhaps a very important reason, however, are
  peoples attitudes to languages.
• Frequently, though, people abandon the language
  which is the repository of their culture and
  history and which has been the language of their
  community for generations because they feel
  ashamed of it.

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Dialect Death

• Just as in the case of language death, so
  irrational, unfavourable attitudes towards
  vernaculars, nonstandard varieties can also lead
  to dialect death.
• This disturbing phenomenon is as much a part of
  the linguistic homogenization of the world.
• In many parts of the world, we are seeing less
  regional variation in language.

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However..

• We have to acknowledge that much dialect loss in
  modern Europe (and in many other parts of the
  world) is due to processes connected with
  geographical mobility and urbanization and is
  therefore probably sociolinguistically
  inevitable.
• There are nothing we can do about that. What we
  can work against is that kind of dialect loss
  which is the result of attitudinal factors.