Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

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