Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 73
to assess the opportunity costs of maintaining their language as greater than those
involved in shifting to the dominant language.
A typical scenario is one in which a relatively isolated community is brought
through processes of urbanisation, industrialisation or other forces of modernisation
(e.g. education, media, tourism etc.) into increased contact with a more powerful,
wealthier, possibly more numerous community. As the language of this dominant
group is progressively associated in the minds of minority language speakers with
wealth, power and opportunity, so it becomes more attractive, and often more
necessary, to learn.
Conversely, the recessive language – as it loses speakers – comes to be associated
with lack of opportunity, the elderly, the past, the rural and the backward. In these
perceptions are mingled objectively accurate judgements as to the relative balance of
economic opportunities, but also elements of self-denigration that are all too easily
developed when the minority language is disparaged by members of the dominant
group and marginalised by political arrangements denying it a role in the public
realm – in state-funded education, for example. Matters are considerably worse if
literacy in the declining language is restricted, if it lacks a literary tradition and if
standardisation is incomplete or recent, for all these tend to weaken prestige.
Language shift in such circumstances is, of course, scarcely painless. Speakers
are often deeply attached to the cultures, identities and histories embedded in their
minority language, but they may nevertheless feel that for economic reasons they
simply cannot afford to transmit the language to their offspring. Here, the problems
of individual versus collective choices present themselves, and can be modelled
psychologically as follows: if a speaker of a minority language decides for reasons of
culture and identity to transmit that language to their children, while others of the
same community transmit the dominant and more economically advantageous
language, they risk ending up a double loser. First, they forgo the economic advantages
available through the dominant language, and second, having done so, they
may find that not enough speakers of the minority language remain for it to be
viable. Anticipating others choices, they may reason that it is better to go with the
flow and transmit the majority language in the first place.
4.1.2 The role of the nation state in minority language decline
Missing from the scenario sketched above, it may be argued, is any explicit mention
of the nation state and nationalist ideology, which several writers have implicated in
minority language marginalisation and loss. Dorian (1998: 18), for example, goes so
far as to assert that:
it is the concept of the nation state coupled with its official standard language,
developed in Europe and extended to the many once-colonial territories of
European states, that has in modern times posed the keenest threat to both the
identities and the languages of small communities.
Grillo (1989: 173) talks, meanwhile, of a nation-state ‘ideology of contempt’