Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 85
say, town and country planning, for, as Aitchison and Carter (2000: 149) note, issues
of housing and land use can have significant cultural and linguistic ramifications –
as, for example, when a new housing estate, providing mainly for in-migrants, is
erected in a rural Welsh-speaking area. No doubt it is considerations such as these
that impel Williams, C. to assert that ‘sound language planning is holistic in nature’
(1991b: 315). In similar vein, both O’Riagain (2001: 213) and Baker (2001: 83)
approvingly echo Bourdieu’s (1991: 57) comment that:
those who seek to defend a threatened language … are obliged to wage a total
struggle. One cannot save the value of a competence unless one saves the market,
in other words, the whole set of political and social conditions of production of
the producers/consumers.
We conclude, then, that the GIDS scale has heuristic value, but gives insufficient
weight to economic variables – to a ‘linguistic market’ affected by economic as well
as political forces.
4.2.2.2 Ethnolinguistic vitality and language revitalisation
A second influential framework in the language revitalisation field, seen by some (e.g.
Bourhis 2001) as complementary to the GIDS scale, is Giles, Bourhis and Taylor’s
1977 model, or framework, of ethnolinguistic vitality; vitality being defined here as
‘that which makes a group likely to behave as a distinct and collective entity within
the intergroup setting’. Because groups with higher levels of ethnolinguistic vitality
have better prospects of survival as a distinctive linguistic-cultural collectivity than
those with lower levels, Giles et al.’s 1977 framework of structural variables affecting
ethnolinguistic vitality assumes considerable significance, and is therefore, displayed
in Figure 4.1.
On the left-hand side are demographic factors divided into two subcategories:
numbers and distribution. The former encompasses the basic features of population
change – growth or decline in absolute numbers as affected by birth rates, patterns
of immigration/emigration and exogamous or endogamous marriages. The latter
refers to the concentration and distribution of group members in particular
geographical locales and their proportion relative to the entire population. Concentrations
of speakers in an area where they constitute a high proportion of the
population has long been acknowledged as one factor favourable to language
maintenance.
Institutional support and control factors in the centre refer to the degree to which
the ethnolinguistic group is represented in, and has control over, institutions at
community, regional or even state level, for example in the media, civil administration,
education, commerce and industry. ‘Formal’ here denotes the extent to
which group members have decision-making powers within institutions, and
‘informal’ refers to the degree of lobby influence exercised by the group. Clearly,
language groups with higher levels of institutional support and control have better
prospects for enhancing their vitality.