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Chapter 4 Minority languages and language revitalisation In this chapter our attention shifts from the United States to Europe, and from migrant, non-territorial linguistic minorities to autochthonous, regional minorities. These tend to have a more privileged position than the former in that their languages enjoy a greater degree of official protection – under the 1992 European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, 1 for example. On the other hand, many of the regional autochthonous languages are endangered to a degree that the language of migrant communities patently are not, and language planning efforts on their behalf have, therefore, focused principally on language revitalisation, which is accordingly the main topic of this chapter. Bilingual education does receive some attention but primarily as an instrument of language transmission beyond the family rather than for the educational issues it raises. The historical, socio-political and economic contexts of language revitalisation projects are, of course, critical not just to an understanding of their motivation but to their eventual success or failure, and for this reason we move in the latter part of this chapter to a comparative case study of Welsh and Breton. The two make an interesting pair for comparison in several respects: both are Celtic languages of the Brythonic or P-Celtic branch of that family; the speakers of both are located in westerly projections of the mainland territories of the founding European nation states of France and the United Kingdom; and both, exposed to competition from two prestigious, standard languages, have for some time been in decline. Their recent trajectories, however, are by no means identical. Welsh is a language whose decline has been, if not reversed, at least stemmed; Breton, on the other hand, is more seriously imperilled as a means of regular spoken communication within its historic territory. By way of background to the case study, however, we first review the causes of language decline, theoretical frameworks for language revitalisation and the arguments commonly advanced for the undertaking of revitalisation in the first place. 4.1 LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT: A BRIEF OVERVIEW Over the last decade, following Krauss’s 1992 paper on the crisis facing the world’s languages, there has been a near flood of publications on the topic of language
72 Language Planning and Education death and obsolescence (e.g. Dixon 1997, Grenoble and Whaley 1998, Nettle and Romaine 2000, Crystal 2000, Fishman 2001a and earlier, Dorian 1989). By now, therefore, the basic facts are reasonably well known: of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages, only some 600 can be considered safe, or, conversely, 90 per cent of the less prestigious, less demographically strong of the world’s languages may become extinct in the course of this century (Krauss 1992, Crystal 2000, Thomason 2001). It would be unduly bold to claim that this literature offers a comprehensive theory of language death, but there is at least a considerable measure of agreement as to its general causes, the sociolinguistic processes that accompany it and the linguistic changes that dying languages typically undergo, which we now summarise briefly below. 4.1.1 Sociological and sociolinguistic factors in language death The literature identifies two main routes to language death. In the less common, languages die with the relatively abrupt demise of their speakers, either through diseases introduced into indigenous communities by early European settlers – in the Americas, for example (see Crystal 2000), or through genocide (e.g. in Tasmania or El Salvador). In the more common route, by contrast, and the one we focus on here, language death is the outcome of gradual processes of language shift, taking place over a time span sufficient for the typical linguistic and sociolinguistic markers of decay to exhibit themselves. The most immediate cause is a breakdown in the intergenerational transmission of the declining language within the family, indicated demographically by a preponderance of elderly speakers and a shortfall of speakers in younger age groups. With the death of the last of these elderly speakers, the language dies. Long before this, however, the language will have already entered a moribund, obsolescent state whose typical sociolinguistic markers are a retreat of the language from public into purely private domains – the family and neighbourhood, for example – leading to a loss of (linguistic) registers and a withdrawal into monostylism. As obsolescence sets in, it is not uncommon for a cross-generational continuum of proficiency in the declining language to emerge, ranging from older speakers of considerable proficiency and fluency; through the middle-aged (the parents), bilingual in the dominant and the declining languages; to a younger generation with extremely limited proficiency in, or merely a passive knowledge of, the dying language. Through insufficient exposure, the speech of this latter group, labelled ‘semi-speakers’ by Dorian (1981), is typically marked by the frequent use of loanwords from the dominant language and by historically aberrant grammar and phonology. It is also halting, with normal conversation stressful. Linguistic changes, then, are also accompaniments of obsolescence: most typically, (1) prolific and asymmetrical borrowing of vocabulary from the dominant language – a process of ‘relexification’ – and (2) simplification and reduction in the grammar and phonology. 2 Beyond the immediate causes of death, however, we also need to consider the often complex and subtle factors that lead minority language speakers
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