Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

82 Language Planning and Education
1. It extends the functional range of the language
2. It confers prestige, and reduces the minority community’s dependence on the
majority community’s print media
3. It provides an alternative medium for communication across time and space.
Stage 4 At stage 4 the threatened language assumes a place in formal education – either in
private schools maintained by the minority community or in state-funded public
schools, where it is taught as a subject or else used as a joint medium along with the
majority language. The attainment of stage 4 marks a significant break from the
preceding stages in two main ways. First, the threatened minority language moves
out of the informal, private domains to which it has largely been confined and into
the public, formal domains hitherto reserved for the dominant majority language.
Second, a measure of control is ceded to the majority community, on whose support
further progress in revitalisation partly depends.
Stage 3 At stage 3 the threatened language reappears in the work domain outside the
minority language community, principally in smaller enterprises, some of which
will be catering to the minority community and others to the majority community.
In some cases the enterprise will be mainly staffed by minority speakers with
some in executive positions, in which case the focus of revitalisation efforts fall
on ensuring that intra-company communication is carried out in the minority
language and that a minority language ethos prevails. Where, however, the enterprise
is controlled and run by majority language speakers, effort is directed towards
ensuring that services are delivered to the minority community in their language.
State 2 At this stage, lower level state institutions (e.g. health and postal services,
government-owned utilities, the police, courts etc.) begin to offer services in
the minority language to those who request such provision. This represents a
considerable advance for the minority language community, but Fishman (1991:
106) is wary that the resulting increased employability of minority language
speakers may draw some of the more able into the ambit of the majority language
community and away from their roots.
Stage 1 At this stage, the highest level of recovery on the GIDS scale, the minority language
will be present in the mass media, higher levels of education and the upper reaches
of state administration. It will have been accorded some degree of official status –
perhaps to the level of co-official language within its territory (see, for example, the
status of Welsh in Wales following the passage of the 1993 Welsh Language Act).
The minority community will enjoy a degree of economic and cultural autonomy.
Finally, although Fishman does not mention it explicitly, it seems likely that the
state will have granted some minority language rights – either on a territorial or a
personality principle.
For Fishman, stage 6 is pivotal since without intergenerational transmission the
threatened language is merely ‘biding its time’. Thus, actions undertaken at other
stages are only truly productive to the extent that they link back and strengthen
this process. He remains noticeably circumspect about the contribution of stages
1 to 4, seeing them as desirable but not central – as is evident in this comment on
stage 3: