Researching Language Loss and Revitalization
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RESEARCHING LANGUAGE LOSS AND REVITALIZATION
INTRODUCTION
Language loss refers to a societal or individual loss in use or in the ability to use a language, implying that another language is replacing it. It is a very common phenomenon world-wide 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 a decade ago. According to his estimates, only 600 languages, that is, fewer than 10% of the languages spoken today, have good chances of surviving until the year 2100. One of the factors counteracting this trend is the corresponding efforts 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 a short description of previous and on-going research on these issues as well as special questions and problems connected to this kind of research. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S A N D M A J O R 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 K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 69–81. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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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; Fishman, 1992). 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 majorit
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