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18 - Language maintenance, shift, and endangerment

from Part IV - Multilingualism and language contact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Nicholas Ostler
Edited by
Rajend Mesthrie
Rajend Mesthrie
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Summary

Language maintenance, shift, and endangerment are all outcomes of the dynamics of language communities. Language maintenance can be thought of as the survival of a language in a situation where it might be expected to be endangered. Fishman points out the issue of how language maintenance is to be secured and difficult to characterize. Language shift is in some sense the complement of language maintenance: it is what happens when a language is not maintained. The progression of a language into a new setting is traditionally characterized as occurring by migration, infiltration, or diffusion, depending on whether a whole speech community moves to a new location. Language documentation includes all potentially permanent recording of a language. The crucial aim of revitalization is to act positively on the process of transmission of a language from one generation to the next.

Keywords

dialect atlas projectsdialectologyEuropean nation-statessocial network theorysociolinguistsJames MilroyLesley Milroy
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics , pp. 315 - 334
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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